On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part I)

[Federica]

What you say about the unchecked etheric health is accurate for the average current soul conditions, but it is precisely the question whether the astral body can be purified (through moral intuitions) to a state at which it begins to unfold its soul functions in harmonious concert with etheric health, rather than at the latter's expense.
That is what we can experience across the threshold, after all, when we pass through the purifying 'fires' and begin to symphonically work on fashioning new healthy bodies for incarnation after the old ones decayed and dispersed.

I’m not sure, Ashvin. Even a purified astral body, as I understand it, is exposed to illness. It’s not the lack of moral intuitions that opens the way to illness. It’s the fact of experiencing an image outside of oneself, it is the sense of otherness, the quality of earthly perception of ‘phenomena’, the Fall, the catabolism of human consciousness, or however else you want to call it. I don’t know what you experience across the threshold, by my sense is that an earthly human needs to be exposed to illness, no matter the level of soul purification. Also, illness is not to be seen as affecting the physical body in isolation. And so I think that "fashioning a new healthy body for incarnation” is not an appropriate way to think about health and sickness, and beauty and morality. The physical body by itself (which is a non-concept) has no problems. You said something similar even in the previous post, you spoke of “biological health”. Health cannot be seen as something biological. If we do that we block understanding of what illness is.

That is the basis for saying inner moral stature, i.e., how harmoniously we are conducting our spiritual activity for the common organism, will become more immediately expressed as beautiful outer physiognomy and biological health. The latter will no longer be in such tight conflict with expanding creative consciousness, as it is for the average intellectual soul that must destroy living matter to generate thoughts and sustain self-consciousness. The more the astral body is purified, the more these same thoughts are felt as symbolically recursive and thus become a means for dipping into the wellspring.

Again - biological health is a non-concept. We need new concepts for health and illness. Illness is, in a certain sense, an excess of health, not a foreign invader of human biology. Because the same processes that constitute man and allow for conscious experience are the process of illness too. They are the same processes. The interrelated qualities of this excess of helth are different for every soul, and it is not only the intellect that destroys living matter to generate thoughts and sustain self-consciousness. In fact, the intellect does not destroy living matter to generate thoughts. It rather destroys cosmic forces, and precipitates dead matter. Producing thoughts in the sense world, no matter how morally inspired, is a catabolic process. It is a necessary death process due to the sensory environment of the Earth.

One way to imaginatively explore that relation is to think about how often we become complacent when in good health. We should really pay attention to the differences that manifest in our disposition towards life, when we are feeling very healthy versus in poor health. It may not be obvious at first, but we can grow more sensitive to it over time. When the biological 'machinery' is running smoothly, we tend to let our guard down, to feel safe, to take things for granted, to start paying less attention to the feedback of our inner states, the long-term picture, and focus more on what we desire in the moment. Then when we snap into a state of poor health, our attitudes and priorities subtly shift. We may even find ourselves making inner promises to live better and try new things if our health is restored. What if we gradually developed the moral stature to be disciplined, vigilant, attentive, and to refashion existing patterns and seek new and deeper experiential frontiers even when everything is humming along smoothly, healthwise? Then wouldn't this inner function of poor health become naturally more and more obsolete? This is generally how accidents, illnesses, and death will disappear from the Earthly spectrum, and there is already much of this gradient of potential that we can begin to imaginatively trace here and now. By imaginatively contemplating this gradient, we refine our intuition for how our present state is embedded within a future perspective and the differential between them, which helps us nudge our flow of becoming in certain ways to realize more of their common aspects, both during life and after death.

This is good advice though. I have myself tried to work in a similar way, taking the opportunity to observe that through training. I have ramped up the pace this year and use this tension to closely monitor the connections between thoughts, feelings, intentions, acts, and fine bodily imbalances that are brought in and smoothened out through the activity. But the inner function of poor health can’t become more and more obsolete by the bare effect of efforts such as these. I think these are a useful means to become more aware of one’s soul tendencies, but not how illness will disappear from the Earthly spectrum. I really don’t think so. Illness is integral to the Earthly spectrum and the consciousness that belongs to it.

Regarding the Steiner quote: yes, in the pre-Anthroposophy lectures Steiner is typically more categorical than in his older age. When it comes to illness and health, he developed the topic enormously in the later part of his life, while in young writings such as this we find more general lines of reasoning, more categorically expressed. Yes, the "health of the world" is promoted by truth and wisdom, and "Moral and physical evils arise from error". I am obviously not negating the effects of karma, including across incarnations, and that an illness or accident can acquire meaning from the perspective of the soul trajectory across many lives. But to only explain illness in these terms is misleading I think. In a big way, we automatically err by the fact itself of being involved in the sensory world. Sense perception is error. I perceive the physical body and form the concept of biological health, for example. That's error. Yes, bringing in phase in our consciousness the world processes with the processes taking place within the context of the human organization is redemptive, but the fact remains that we have to exist in this convolution and to negotiate a balance. Health and illness are the movements that give us a chance to seek that balance point. To pick up your example of sensitizing oneself to the inner feelings of being healthy or not so healthy: it's not that by being mindful of your habits you end up prolonging and supporting the phases of feeling healthy, seen as the goal. Rather, if illness were progressively eliminated in this way that you say, you would become too healthy. That would not be viable long term, some of your sheaths would be too loose, you would subtly approach vegetative life in some areas, maybe you would become insensitive to this or that, and illness would be called forth, in a way or another, by the same processes that had brought you to excessive health. Health is not an equilibrium in itself. Through oscillating between health and illness, we operate those necessary movements through which we can refine our consciousness and evolve. That's how I see it at this point.

[AshvinP]

What you say about the unchecked etheric health is accurate for the average current soul conditions, but it is precisely the question whether the astral body can be purified (through moral intuitions) to a state at which it begins to unfold its soul functions in harmonious concert with etheric health, rather than at the latter's expense.
That is what we can experience across the threshold, after all, when we pass through the purifying 'fires' and begin to symphonically work on fashioning new healthy bodies for incarnation after the old ones decayed and dispersed.

I’m not sure, Ashvin. Even a purified astral body, as I understand it, is exposed to illness. It’s not the lack of moral intuitions that opens the way to illness. It’s the fact of experiencing an image outside of oneself, it is the sense of otherness, the quality of earthly perception of ‘phenomena’, the Fall, the catabolism of human consciousness, or however else you want to call it. I don’t know what you experience across the threshold, by my sense is that an earthly human needs to be exposed to illness, no matter the level of soul purification. Also, illness is not to be seen as affecting the physical body in isolation. And so I think that "fashioning a new healthy body for incarnation” is not an appropriate way to think about health and sickness, and beauty and morality. The physical body by itself (which is a non-concept) has no problems. You said something similar even in the previous post, you spoke of “biological health”. Health cannot be seen as something biological. If we do that we block understanding of what illness is.

That is the basis for saying inner moral stature, i.e., how harmoniously we are conducting our spiritual activity for the common organism, will become more immediately expressed as beautiful outer physiognomy and biological health. The latter will no longer be in such tight conflict with expanding creative consciousness, as it is for the average intellectual soul that must destroy living matter to generate thoughts and sustain self-consciousness. The more the astral body is purified, the more these same thoughts are felt as symbolically recursive and thus become a means for dipping into the wellspring.

Again - biological health is a non-concept. We need new concepts for health and illness. Illness is, in a certain sense, an excess of health, not a foreign invader of human biology. Because the same processes that constitute man and allow for conscious experience are the process of illness too. They are the same processes. The interrelated qualities of this excess of helth are different for every soul, and it is not only the intellect that destroys living matter to generate thoughts and sustain self-consciousness. In fact, the intellect does not destroy living matter to generate thoughts. It rather destroys cosmic forces, and precipitates dead matter. Producing thoughts in the sense world, no matter how morally inspired, is a catabolic process. It is a necessary death process due to the sensory environment of the Earth.

One way to imaginatively explore that relation is to think about how often we become complacent when in good health. We should really pay attention to the differences that manifest in our disposition towards life, when we are feeling very healthy versus in poor health. It may not be obvious at first, but we can grow more sensitive to it over time. When the biological 'machinery' is running smoothly, we tend to let our guard down, to feel safe, to take things for granted, to start paying less attention to the feedback of our inner states, the long-term picture, and focus more on what we desire in the moment. Then when we snap into a state of poor health, our attitudes and priorities subtly shift. We may even find ourselves making inner promises to live better and try new things if our health is restored. What if we gradually developed the moral stature to be disciplined, vigilant, attentive, and to refashion existing patterns and seek new and deeper experiential frontiers even when everything is humming along smoothly, healthwise? Then wouldn't this inner function of poor health become naturally more and more obsolete? This is generally how accidents, illnesses, and death will disappear from the Earthly spectrum, and there is already much of this gradient of potential that we can begin to imaginatively trace here and now. By imaginatively contemplating this gradient, we refine our intuition for how our present state is embedded within a future perspective and the differential between them, which helps us nudge our flow of becoming in certain ways to realize more of their common aspects, both during life and after death.

This is good advice though. I have myself tried to work in a similar way, taking the opportunity to observe that through training. I have ramped up the pace this year and use this tension to closely monitor the connections between thoughts, feelings, intentions, acts, and fine bodily imbalances that are brought in and smoothened out through the activity. But the inner function of poor health can’t become more and more obsolete by the bare effect of efforts such as these. I think these are a useful means to become more aware of one’s soul tendencies, but not how illness will disappear from the Earthly spectrum. I really don’t think so. Illness is integral to the Earthly spectrum and the consciousness that belongs to it.

Regarding the Steiner quote: yes, in the pre-Anthroposophy lectures Steiner is typically more categorical than in his older age. When it comes to illness and health, he developed the topic enormously in the later part of his life, while in young writings such as this we find more general lines of reasoning, more categorically expressed. Yes, the "health of the world" is promoted by truth and wisdom, and "Moral and physical evils arise from error". I am obviously not negating the effects of karma, including across incarnations, and that an illness or accident can acquire meaning from the perspective of the soul trajectory across many lives. But to only explain illness in these terms is misleading I think. In a big way, we automatically err by the fact itself of being involved in the sensory world. Sense perception is error. I perceive the physical body and form the concept of biological health, for example. That's error. Yes, bringing in phase in our consciousness the world processes with the processes taking place within the context of the human organization is redemptive, but the fact remains that we have to exist in this convolution and to negotiate a balance. Health and illness are the movements that give us a chance to seek that balance point. To pick up your example of sensitizing oneself to the inner feelings of being healthy or not so healthy: it's not that by being mindful of your habits you end up prolonging and supporting the phases of feeling healthy, seen as the goal. Rather, if illness were progressively eliminated in this way that you say, you would become too healthy. That would not be viable long term, some of your sheaths would be too loose, you would subtly approach vegetative life in some areas, maybe you would become insensitive to this or that, and illness would be called forth, in a way or another, by the same processes that had brought you to excessive health. Health is not an equilibrium in itself. Through oscillating between health and illness, we operate those necessary movements through which we can refine our consciousness and evolve. That's how I see it at this point.

I think that there are two related issues that should be addressed here.

If we are pre-defining "Earthly spectrum" as our decohered physical experience, then yes, it makes sense to say that, as long as we continue to experience the flow that way, we are necessarily bouncing between health and illness. Because when the astral body is purified to the state at which its soul functions are much more harmonized with the etheric functions (instead of impressing its disharmonious soul patterns into the etheric, which eventually lead to all manner of disease), then our inner perspective on the Earthly spectrum and its transformations will be quite different. It would be a classic 3rd-person error to assume that, as more of this spectrum is restored to the Edenic flow, we could witness it all happening from our familiar intellectual-sensory perspective. Our entire sense of who "we" are, including all our perceptions, thoughts, memories, feelings, character traits, etc., and what kind of reality we are involved in, will simultaneously transform with our purified astral body that now consciously participates in the more Edenic flow. So if we are defining the Earthly spectrum that way, then this spectrum simply won't exist in the future.  

Yet if we keep the concept of "Earthly spectrum" more flexible to include its ongoing transformations through the epochs, as its sphere of conscious activity grows into its Cosmic context, then I think we have to recognize the whole reason for astral purification is to facilitate the resurrection of dead matter, precipitated from our intellectual consciousness as you say.  The key here is to recognize how our current state is something fluid and variable, and what can be experienced in future incarnations for humanity can be at least partially experienced in our current developmental stages on the initiatory path. We can get a feel for how our experience of the Earthly spectrum is shaped precisely by selfish, gluttonous, lustful, deceitful, etc. astral tendencies which fix attention on discrete elements, chaotically moving between them, unfolding 'ticking' thoughts in sequence, narrowing interest into momentary desires, adding externalized thoughts, and so on. We can only get a deeper appreciation for this when we live through the other pole of the Edenic flow via imaginative concentration, yet even before we have done that to any significant extent, we can still explore these things at a principled level. Our thoughts about and dim feelings for these astral currents should not be confused for the latter, rather they are invisible vectors along which our whole soul life unfolds. It is similar to what Cleric mentioned when speaking of how all our physical movements at this stage are mediated through bioelectricity. Our entire feeling for what the Earthly spectrum is and how it transforms is deviated 'off center' by such Lu and Ahr influences.

I know you are already aware, but it's worth highlighting again that this deviation is not some absolute mechanism embedded in sensory life itself, which indefinitely imprisons the soul, rather the root is in the soul body and its tendencies when interacting with sensory impressions. The latter are truly experiences of more holistic interfering intents that steer the Edenic flow. It is very useful to think of sensory perceptions as highly chopped up intuitions. Error only comes in when we mediate those perceptions through our egoistic soul life and corresponding externalized thoughts. For that reason, it makes little sense to say we will purify the astral body but the rhythms of health and sickness, the experience of toil and suffering, and so on, will basically remain the same for us. You say that the earthly human soul needs to be exposed to illness, no matter the level of soul purification. Does this mean that soul purification makes absolutely no difference to the health of our organism? Or do you acknowledge that it will lead to unsuspected forces of healing being drawn into the bodies, but you see these transformations as being too incremental and marginal to make much of a difference? Or is it something else I am missing? 

The other issue is whether we can concretely explore how astral purification will also drive this etheric harmonization, and thus a fading out of illness and even death, in the here and now. A critical consideration here is the inner principle of the Fall, by which toil, suffering, and death was intermixed with the Edenic flow. What functions do they serve? When we look at the increasingly common transhumanist impulse, we see that many souls want to do away with these things in an entirely externalized way. When Levin enthusiastically speaks about 'freedom of embodiment', body modeling, regenerative medicine, etc., as a prime example, we can sense how he cares very little about the inner consequences and wants to see such technologies pushed to market as quickly as possible. He thinks it is absurd that souls should have to endure a personally unsatisfactory outer appearance, let alone the rhythms of illness, disfigurements from accidents, and so on. What is the problem here? Well, if a person can take a pill and release a bunch of 'anthrobots' into his bloodstream that build him a new liver, then he wouldn't be learning any inner lessons from conducting his spiritual activity in such a way that he destroyed the old one. There would be no incentive to reflect on that past activity and how it deviated the soul from its ideal trajectory, from the path of attraction to its future archetypal perspective.

This is the simple principle at work and there's no need to overcomplicate things too much. The main thrust of suffering, illness, and death in the Earthly spectrum is to provide the soul opportunities for perfecting its spiritual activity as we habitually conduct it in disharmonious ways with the progressive intents. When we learn to harmonize the contextual rhythms of existence through inner development, then we simultaneously mitigate against the need for these inner functions of disease and suffering. All pathological pursuits in this area, such as transhumanism, seek to accomplish such goals without the corresponding inner development. They intuit the general direction of evolution, the retracing of the Fall, but are not quite willing to connect that direction to the sacrificial inner path. Perhaps we will say that it can't be that simple, that something else must be at work, but then we should at least propose some other inner reasons why disease should persist despite our moral development that obviates its functions within the experiential flow. Again, saying we would become "too healthy" implies that our inner constitution basically remains the same as we purify the soul life, but why would we assume that to be the case? In other words, the standard of what is "too healthy" will change as our soul lives are morally transformed.

Let's take a look at another reference point from Steiner:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA094/En ... 20restored

The epidemics which raged notably in the Middle Ages are one example among thousands of the relation of human sins to astral events, as well as of the repercussion in the astral world of sins committed in earthly life. Leprosy was the result of the terror caused by the invasions of the Huns and hordes of Asiatic peoples. The Mongolians, the descendants of the Atlanteans, bore within them the germs of degeneracy. This contact with the European populace produced, in the first instance, the moral malady of fear in the astral world; the substance of the astral body decomposed and this field of astral decomposition became a field for the development of bacteria, giving rise, on Earth, to diseases such as leprosy.

All that we throw out of ourselves into the astral world at one time will reappear in times to come, on the physical plane. What we sow in the astral world we reap on Earth in future times. We are reaping today the fruits of the narrow, materialistic thoughts strewn by our ancestors in the astral world.

This will make us realise how essential it is to nourish ourselves with occult truths. If science would accept the truths of occultism—merely as hypotheses to begin with—the very world would change. Materialism has cast man into such depths that a mighty concentration of forces is necessary to raise him again. He is subject to illnesses of the nervous system which are veritable epidemics of the life of the soul.

What on the Earth we call feeling comes back again to Earth in the form of actuality, event, fact. The nerve-storms that exhaust man have their origin in the astral world.

It is for this reason that the Occult Brotherhoods decided to demonstrate and reveal the hidden truths. For humanity is passing through a crisis and must be helped to regain health and equilibrium. Only by virtue of spirituality can this health and equilibrium be restored.

Such astral dynamics are still at play now and the main driver of many lingering diseases and conditions. Purifying the astral body in the here and now is the path by which we begin sowing spiritual (symbolically recursive) thought-seeds in the astral soil, which in future times will be reaped as the fruits of greatly decreased epidemics, maladies, chronic conditions, etc. And the phase-gap between the astral and the physical spectrum is decreasing now, so we aren't speaking of completely remote future possibilities, but inner trajectories of development that will make a huge difference in the near future.

[Federica]

I think that there are two related issues that should be addressed here.

If we are pre-defining "Earthly spectrum" as our decohered physical experience, then yes, it makes sense to say that, as long as we continue to experience the flow that way, we are necessarily bouncing between health and illness. Because when the astral body is purified to the state at which its soul functions are much more harmonized with the etheric functions (instead of impressing its disharmonious soul patterns into the etheric, which eventually lead to all manner of disease), then our inner perspective on the Earthly spectrum and its transformations will be quite different. It would be a classic 3rd-person error to assume that, as more of this spectrum is restored to the Edenic flow, we could witness it all happening from our familiar intellectual-sensory perspective. Our entire sense of who "we" are, including all our perceptions, thoughts, memories, feelings, character traits, etc., and what kind of reality we are involved in, will simultaneously transform with our purified astral body that now consciously participates in the more Edenic flow. So if we are defining the Earthly spectrum that way, then this spectrum simply won't exist in the future.

By simply acknowledging that even the Initiate lives as a human organization that comprises a physical body entangled in the earthly sphere, I am not pre-defining the earthly spectrum. Today, there is no way around this fact, even with all modifications of perception, FTW, and morality brought about by Initiation. This earthly convoluted state is the character of the planet incarnation Earth, symbolized by the encircled cross:

I think this symbol dramatically expresses this character of separation/polarity and reciprocation/mirroring that is characteristic of this spectrum. Even when the soul is purified and higher cognition is developed, it is an earthly spirituality that is developed. Its context remains that of the earthly spectrum, anchored locally through a physical body. With this, I am simply acknowledging the facts that pertain to incarnate existence. In other words, even when the life flow is not (or less) experienced as decohered physical experience, the human organization as a whole remains submitted to the interplay of cosmic and telluric forces, and Initiation must happen within the physical-soul-spiritual context of the Earthly spectrum. Not to say that this spectrum is static. It surely transforms with the evolution of consciousness. As you say, in the far future it will be so transformed that it won’t be Earth anymore, but for now - and surely a number of centuries, perhaps millennia to come - we can’t simply put it aside and do as if it could be completely overcome through Initiation. The kind of reality the Initiate is involved in, even if transformed, has and will have to count with this. I agree that “this spectrum will simply not exist in the future”, but we are speaking of what one should think, feel and will on the path of inner development in our time, to drive the evolution of this spectrum.

Yet if we keep the concept of "Earthly spectrum" more flexible to include its ongoing transformations through the epochs, as its sphere of conscious activity grows into its Cosmic context, then I think we have to recognize the whole reason for astral purification is to facilitate the resurrection of dead matter, precipitated from our intellectual consciousness as you say.  The key here is to recognize how our current state is something fluid and variable, and what can be experienced in future incarnations for humanity can be at least partially experienced in our current developmental stages on the initiatory path. We can get a feel for how our experience of the Earthly spectrum is shaped precisely by selfish, gluttonous, lustful, deceitful, etc. astral tendencies which fix attention on discrete elements, chaotically moving between them, unfolding 'ticking' thoughts in sequence, narrowing interest into momentary desires, adding externalized thoughts, and so on. We can only get a deeper appreciation for this when we live through the other pole of the Edenic flow via imaginative concentration, yet even before we have done that to any significant extent, we can still explore these things at a principled level. Our thoughts about and dim feelings for these astral currents should not be confused for the latter, rather they are invisible vectors along which our whole soul life unfolds. It is similar to what Cleric mentioned when speaking of how all our physical movements at this stage are mediated through bioelectricity. Our entire feeling for what the Earthly spectrum is and how it transforms is deviated 'off center' by such Lu and Ahr influences.

If this is a tangled way to suggest that what I am saying is not valid because my thoughts and feelings about the Earthly spectrum are deviated off center by the invisible vectors of the adversarial influences, well, then there is no value in continuing this discussion, since this objection has nothing to do with the topic in question but aims to invalidate a priori whatever I may say. Something to note is that, whatever lays at the ground of my perspective - and especially if it is dictated by adversarial forces - it must be entirely possible to argue its wrongness in factual terms, if it is wrong, and that’s what you should focus on, if you don’t agree with it, rather than suggest that my ideas should not be confused with the reality of how things stand. Yes, the course of destiny is affected by our conduct now, and yes, the now can be expanded, but the entry point cannot be done away with just by wish. As it's been often said, the earthly spectrum comprehends layers that are as little in phase with our higher will as they possibly can (the material layers).

I know you are already aware, but it's worth highlighting again that this deviation is not some absolute mechanism embedded in sensory life itself, which indefinitely imprisons the soul, rather the root is in the soul body and its tendencies when interacting with sensory impressions. The latter are truly experiences of more holistic interfering intents that steer the Edenic flow. It is very useful to think of sensory perceptions as highly chopped up intuitions. Error only comes in when we mediate those perceptions through our egoistic soul life and corresponding externalized thoughts. 

Yes, I see that such deviations are soul deviations. But what I said is something else: even the purified soul lives in a human organization that comprises sense organs which literally let the earthly spectrum penetrate that human organization; a head system that works destructively from above downward; and a metabolic process that builds up stuff from below up, to oppose the previous, etcetera. Initiates don’t gouge out their eyes or behead themselves. Instead, as they purify their souls, they have to also count with these and other facts of the earthly spectrum. Even, the earthly spectrum - in the sense just referred to - is the mandatory context within which they have to walk the initiatic path. And I don’t think that error only comes in when we mediate perception through the egoistic soul. Rather, error is integral to the earthly sphere , for the reasons just mentioned. To be noted, you didn’t find anything to object when Rodriel for example said that incarnation is a malady (which is not the concept I would use, but let’s not go back to that now). But now you say that deviation ad error are only a soul thing, while the Earth has nothing to do with that. Do you see the lack of reciprocity in this view?
One may think of Intuitions as chopped sensory perceptions, but do those chippings have the quality of what is then actually experienced in Intuition? Our incarnation, although it is not a malady, immerses us in error, by its very nature. To err does not mean moral wrongdoing, or soul vice, but simply contextuality within the planetary incarnation “Earth”, with all that comes with it. Here again, I can’t help getting a sense of mystical obstination from the overall mood of your words.

For that reason, it makes little sense to say we will purify the astral body but the rhythms of health and sickness, the experience of toil and suffering, and so on, will basically remain the same for us. You say that the earthly human soul needs to be exposed to illness, no matter the level of soul purification. Does this mean that soul purification makes absolutely no difference to the health of our organism? Or do you acknowledge that it will lead to unsuspected forces of healing being drawn into the bodies, but you see these transformations as being too incremental and marginal to make much of a difference? Or is it something else I am missing?

I think it makes a lot of sense to say that the experience of health and illness (which is not properly identical with toil and suffering) persists (I didn’t say it remains the same) for the Initiate. The problem is, I believe, a concept of illness itself that needs refreshing. It seems to me that you conceive health as a desirable state of equilibrium (an ideal) and illness as the absence of health. This is source of confusion. Like healing, getting sick is not a condition or a state, but a dynamic process that allows the human organization to continually rebalance itself and pursue life, be it within or across any given incarnational rhythm. In this way, the point of balance is not in a supposedly healthy state. The balance arises from the constant reciprocation of forces - a character of the earthly spectrum - that tend towards health at one swing of the pendulum, and toward illness at the next. It can’t be a static balance. Wishing to “eradicate illness” and blissfully “remain healthy” is as if wishing that the pendulum could stop moving in mid-air. It’s a rhythm, like day and night. We don’t say “We want to eradicate night and purify the Earth until we will live in a permanent state of daylight.” We rather say that we want to work to bring consciousness into sleep. The same goes for health and illness: they are phases of one and the same process, which has to take its course. Our ambition should be to grow in consciousness inside it as a whole, not to eradicate half of it. What complicates things a lot is that such course is not always symptomatic in a way that makes us feel “I am sick”, and never intelligible through biology alone. For example, we discussed a few months ago how the forces of growth - that in lower animals account for a regrown limb, tail, or head - become to a large extent forces of consciousness in man (which is why we can’t regrow functional parts). At the 7-year mark, the last burst of these forces is the outpouring of the second dentition. That’s a spectacular event, if you think about it, kind of like a plenaria regrowing a head. But then the child stops dreaming, starts thinking, and those anabolic forces of growth are exhausted to a large extent, for the rest of earthly life, to pass into the catabolism of head activity. This is at the same time a healing and a sickening process. It’s healing because, if the growing forces were to keep pushing in the grown-up body, they would favor tumor-like growth (which indeed happens when, due to any number of concomitant micro-factors, those forces are not appropriately transmuted into consciousness, which indeed stand at the origin of certain cancers appearing in adult life). And it is also an illness process, because the head forces emerging from it are death forces. In particular, they are degrading, poisoning forces towards the metabolic system. Our metabolism is literally sickened by what we do with our head. Hence it put forth its counter measures - and so on and do forth, and the dance of health and illness keeps unfolding. The same processes are both healing and sickening, and we can see clearly from the example how it would make no sense to say that a purified soul would allow the Initiate to freeze this process, eradicate illness from it, and only stick to the healthy side. The same applies to all other processes that constitute the human organization within the earthly spectrum.

This said, soul purification - and everything else the soul does - definitely makes a difference in the patterns of health and illness, since it changes the organization of the sheaths, and how they interact with the spectrums of cosmic and telluric forces. For sure, there are infinite ways to make the pendulum swings more harmonious, in the now and in the future. But these evolving interactions remain dynamic (pendulum-like) and steered by certain patterns. These patterns are moreover collective to a certain extent. But the key point is that we need these patterns of reciprocation. There’s no anabolism without catabolism, no build-up without destruction, and no health without illness. This becomes clear once these concepts are revised in accordance with the nature of man as microcosm of the Cosmos, and in accordance with the reciprocal relation linking man and the kingdoms of nature.

The other issue is whether we can concretely explore how astral purification will also drive this etheric harmonization, and thus a fading out of illness and even death, in the here and now. A critical consideration here is the inner principle of the Fall, by which toil, suffering, and death was intermixed with the Edenic flow. What functions do they serve? When we look at the increasingly common transhumanist impulse, we see that many souls want to do away with these things in an entirely externalized way. When Levin enthusiastically speaks about 'freedom of embodiment', body modeling, regenerative medicine, etc., as a prime example, we can sense how he cares very little about the inner consequences and wants to see such technologies pushed to market as quickly as possible. He thinks it is absurd that souls should have to endure a personally unsatisfactory outer appearance, let alone the rhythms of illness, disfigurements from accidents, and so on. What is the problem here? Well, if a person can take a pill and release a bunch of 'anthrobots' into his bloodstream that build him a new liver, then he wouldn't be learning any inner lessons from conducting his spiritual activity in such a way that he destroyed the old one. There would be no incentive to reflect on that past activity and how it deviated the soul from its ideal trajectory, from the path of attraction to its future archetypal perspective.

This is the simple principle at work and there's no need to overcomplicate things too much. The main thrust of suffering, illness, and death in the Earthly spectrum is to provide the soul opportunities for perfecting its spiritual activity as we habitually conduct it in disharmonious ways with the progressive intents. When we learn to harmonize the contextual rhythms of existence through inner development, then we simultaneously mitigate against the need for these inner functions of disease and suffering. All pathological pursuits in this area, such as transhumanism, seek to accomplish such goals without the corresponding inner development. They intuit the general direction of evolution, the retracing of the Fall, but are not quite willing to connect that direction to the sacrificial inner path. Perhaps we will say that it can't be that simple, that something else must be at work, but then we should at least propose some other inner reasons why disease should persist despite our moral development that obviates its functions within the experiential flow. Again, saying we would become "too healthy" implies that our inner constitution basically remains the same as we purify the soul life, but why would we assume that to be the case? In other words, the standard of what is "too healthy" will change as our soul lives are morally transformed.

I hope we can agree now that this second issue has been addressed too. Astral purification cannot alone drive full etheric harmonization, and etheric harmonization is far from being the only factor behind the dynamics of the healing-sickening process. These movements of life that organize the becoming of the human being - or seen from another side, the becoming of the natural world - are indeed complex. These are the same core dynamics that characterize the functioning of the earthly spectrum and I guess there is no way around this complexity. The same diversity of form and movement we find in the wise tableau of earthly nature is at play in the human organization as well, to characterize the manifold nature of the pendulum swings in the rhythm of healing and becoming ill again. By the way, here is a question, that I am leaving open, in relation to: “if a person can take a pill and release a bunch of 'anthrobots' into his bloodstream that build him a new liver, then he wouldn't be learning any inner lessons from conducting his spiritual activity in such a way that he destroyed the old one”: If instead of an anthrobots treatment you give a patient, say, arsenicum album, or another anthroposophycal remedy, would the patient learn any inner lessons from their conduct?

Hopefully I have hinted by now at the reasons why I believe we cannot reduce this question to extreme simplicity, and what the reasons are for the coexistence of illness and the development of the consciousness soul, for some long time to come, and granted that the now can be expanded, as said. Regarding the Steiner quote - again, a pre-Anthroposophy quote that addresses the question at a different level of granularity compared to the one we were at - sure, there is no denying that soul work has an effect on the quality of the pendulum swings, at individual and collective level, and that whoever sows wind will harvest storm. Materialism and other astral excesses make the collective pendulum go crazy, so to say, requiring proportionate countermeasures. But even the countermeasures will not be final, and will inevitably pass into excess at some point, substantiating the need for the subsequent wave of reciprocation, along the health and illness axis. I agree that at some future point all these waves will have to be brought into complete phase, but that’s when as planetary incarnation will subside. And no Initiate can make it subside here and now by pure force of higher cognition, meditation, and soul purification.

[AshvinP]

I think that there are two related issues that should be addressed here.

If we are pre-defining "Earthly spectrum" as our decohered physical experience, then yes, it makes sense to say that, as long as we continue to experience the flow that way, we are necessarily bouncing between health and illness. Because when the astral body is purified to the state at which its soul functions are much more harmonized with the etheric functions (instead of impressing its disharmonious soul patterns into the etheric, which eventually lead to all manner of disease), then our inner perspective on the Earthly spectrum and its transformations will be quite different. It would be a classic 3rd-person error to assume that, as more of this spectrum is restored to the Edenic flow, we could witness it all happening from our familiar intellectual-sensory perspective. Our entire sense of who "we" are, including all our perceptions, thoughts, memories, feelings, character traits, etc., and what kind of reality we are involved in, will simultaneously transform with our purified astral body that now consciously participates in the more Edenic flow. So if we are defining the Earthly spectrum that way, then this spectrum simply won't exist in the future.

By simply acknowledging that even the Initiate lives as a human organization that comprises a physical body entangled in the earthly sphere, I am not pre-defining the earthly spectrum. Today, there is no way around this fact, even with all modifications of perception, FTW, and morality brought about by Initiation. This earthly convoluted state is the character of the planet incarnation Earth, symbolized by the encircled cross:

I think this symbol dramatically expresses this character of separation/polarity and reciprocation/mirroring that is characteristic of this spectrum. Even when the soul is purified and higher cognition is developed, it is an earthly spirituality that is developed. Its context remains that of the earthly spectrum, anchored locally through a physical body. With this, I am simply acknowledging the facts that pertain to incarnate existence. In other words, even when the life flow is not (or less) experienced as decohered physical experience, the human organization as a whole remains submitted to the interplay of cosmic and telluric forces, and Initiation must happen within the physical-soul-spiritual context of the Earthly spectrum. Not to say that this spectrum is static. It surely transforms with the evolution of consciousness. As you say, in the far future it will be so transformed that it won’t be Earth anymore, but for now - and surely a number of centuries, perhaps millennia to come - we can’t simply put it aside and do as if it could be completely overcome through Initiation. The kind of reality the Initiate is involved in, even if transformed, has and will have to count with this. I agree that “this spectrum will simply not exist in the future”, but we are speaking of what one should think, feel and will on the path of inner development in our time, to drive the evolution of this spectrum.

If we are speaking of millennia to come, then I think we are surely dealing with a much less static 'dance' of reciprocating processes than your posts indicate. Again, there is no need to think of this topic in binaries, as if we will completely overcome the effects of the Fall in upcoming years or we won't overcome anything at all, and instead will remain stuck in the usual rhythms of experience. You have very adequately described the current conditions in your posts, but we also need to seek temporal intuition (remember the Taylor series metaphor) of how the dance may find states of equilibrium at deeper levels of integration. At these deeper levels, what projects into our physical scale as the catabolic, destructive, illness processes are experienced as something quite different. They are experienced as much more synonymous with Life processes, just as the functions of the motor and sensory neurons are more unified at the deeper scales, or the pumping heart and the flowing blood. Thus, integrating the dance through the evolutionary process is also synonymous with resurrecting Life within the Earthly spectrum, and many facets of this resurrection can be experienced here and now by individual souls and communities. Through such experience, we also begin to realize the outsized effects of our individual efforts at inner harmonization, just as you hinted in the post to Kaje. These effects can drastically change the cultural landscape and the prospects for communities leading much healthier lives in the near future, just as souls ignoring the inner harmonization will drastically change the landscape in an unhealthy direction.

Yet if we keep the concept of "Earthly spectrum" more flexible to include its ongoing transformations through the epochs, as its sphere of conscious activity grows into its Cosmic context, then I think we have to recognize the whole reason for astral purification is to facilitate the resurrection of dead matter, precipitated from our intellectual consciousness as you say.  The key here is to recognize how our current state is something fluid and variable, and what can be experienced in future incarnations for humanity can be at least partially experienced in our current developmental stages on the initiatory path. We can get a feel for how our experience of the Earthly spectrum is shaped precisely by selfish, gluttonous, lustful, deceitful, etc. astral tendencies which fix attention on discrete elements, chaotically moving between them, unfolding 'ticking' thoughts in sequence, narrowing interest into momentary desires, adding externalized thoughts, and so on. We can only get a deeper appreciation for this when we live through the other pole of the Edenic flow via imaginative concentration, yet even before we have done that to any significant extent, we can still explore these things at a principled level. Our thoughts about and dim feelings for these astral currents should not be confused for the latter, rather they are invisible vectors along which our whole soul life unfolds. It is similar to what Cleric mentioned when speaking of how all our physical movements at this stage are mediated through bioelectricity. Our entire feeling for what the Earthly spectrum is and how it transforms is deviated 'off center' by such Lu and Ahr influences.

If this is a tangled way to suggest that what I am saying is not valid because my thoughts and feelings about the Earthly spectrum are deviated off center by the invisible vectors of the adversarial influences, well, then there is no value in continuing this discussion, since this objection has nothing to do with the topic in question but aims to invalidate a priori whatever I may say. Something to note is that, whatever lays at the ground of my perspective - and especially if it is dictated by adversarial forces - it must be entirely possible to argue its wrongness in factual terms, if it is wrong, and that’s what you should focus on, if you don’t agree with it, rather than suggest that my ideas should not be confused with the reality of how things stand. Yes, the course of destiny is affected by our conduct now, and yes, the now can be expanded, but the entry point cannot be done away with just by wish. As it's been often said, the earthly spectrum comprehends layers that are as little in phase with our higher will as they possibly can (the material layers).

No, Federica, that's not what it was, at all. It was meant to emphasize how the process of astral purification, as that is understood by the initiate, is not something we are very familiar with in ordinary life - it's not simply resisting momentary desires, tweaking our likes and dislikes, revisiting our opinions, and things of that nature. Even when we see it that way, we can trace how such incremental transformations will promote health, but it still feels like something bound to our personal sphere and not very significant for the Earthly sphere as a whole. Of course, we need to start with such personal steps, but the transformation of the astral body into Manas is understood as a much deeper and collective transformation in esoteric science, which will profoundly transform the Earthly landscape (in the current planetary aeon) and the diseases which currently plague that landscape. This can all be supported from the Anthroposophical (not pre-) lectures of Steiner as well. He never stopped emphasizing this core transformation that was made possible by Christ incarnate and the profound forces of healing which would flow in during the Earthly convolution, as we retrace the steps of the Fall (which only began unfolding in the Lemurian epoch).

I know you are already aware, but it's worth highlighting again that this deviation is not some absolute mechanism embedded in sensory life itself, which indefinitely imprisons the soul, rather the root is in the soul body and its tendencies when interacting with sensory impressions. The latter are truly experiences of more holistic interfering intents that steer the Edenic flow. It is very useful to think of sensory perceptions as highly chopped up intuitions. Error only comes in when we mediate those perceptions through our egoistic soul life and corresponding externalized thoughts. 

Yes, I see that such deviations are soul deviations. But what I said is something else: even the purified soul lives in a human organization that comprises sense organs which literally let the earthly spectrum penetrate that human organization; a head system that works destructively from above downward; and a metabolic process that builds up stuff from below up, to oppose the previous, etcetera. Initiates don’t gouge out their eyes or behead themselves. Instead, as they purify their souls, they have to also count with these and other facts of the earthly spectrum. Even, the earthly spectrum - in the sense just referred to - is the mandatory context within which they have to walk the initiatic path. And I don’t think that error only comes in when we mediate perception through the egoistic soul. Rather, error is integral to the earthly sphere , for the reasons just mentioned. To be noted, you didn’t find anything to object when Rodriel for example said that incarnation is a malady (which is not the concept I would use, but let’s not go back to that now). But now you say that deviation ad error are only a soul thing, while the Earth has nothing to do with that. Do you see the lack of reciprocity in this view?
One may think of Intuitions as chopped sensory perceptions, but do those chippings have the quality of what is then actually experienced in Intuition? Our incarnation, although it is not a malady, immerses us in error, by its very nature. To err does not mean moral wrongdoing, or soul vice, but simply contextuality within the planetary incarnation “Earth”, with all that comes with it. Here again, I can’t help getting a sense of mystical obstination from the overall mood of your words.

The idea that error is integral to earthly sphere seems to question the core phenomenological foundations of our existence. In fact, we can make a ton of progress in minimizing error here and now, by enlivening and purifying our imaginative life. Then the chopped up intuitions (sensory impressions and corresponding thoughts) begin to testify more and more to the deeper intuitive intents which they previously concealed, as they were rendered opaque by our disharmonious (selfish) soul patterns.

By the way, when you say "only a soul thing", this is why I added the 'off center' comments before. It seems like you are vastly underestimating how powerful the soul world and the astral currents are in shaping the Earthly spectrum.

When Rodriel spoke of reincarnation as a malady, he was precisely pointing to how it will end (and thus the experience of physical illness and death will end). That will happen during the Earthly aeon.

For that reason, it makes little sense to say we will purify the astral body but the rhythms of health and sickness, the experience of toil and suffering, and so on, will basically remain the same for us. You say that the earthly human soul needs to be exposed to illness, no matter the level of soul purification. Does this mean that soul purification makes absolutely no difference to the health of our organism? Or do you acknowledge that it will lead to unsuspected forces of healing being drawn into the bodies, but you see these transformations as being too incremental and marginal to make much of a difference? Or is it something else I am missing?

I think it makes a lot of sense to say that the experience of health and illness (which is not properly identical with toil and suffering) persists (I didn’t say it remains the same) for the Initiate. The problem is, I believe, a concept of illness itself that needs refreshing. It seems to me that you conceive health as a desirable state of equilibrium (an ideal) and illness as the absence of health. This is source of confusion. Like healing, getting sick is not a condition or a state, but a dynamic process that allows the human organization to continually rebalance itself and pursue life, be it within or across any given incarnational rhythm. In this way, the point of balance is not in a supposedly healthy state. The balance arises from the constant reciprocation of forces - a character of the earthly spectrum - that tend towards health at one swing of the pendulum, and toward illness at the next. It can’t be a static balance. Wishing to “eradicate illness” and blissfully “remain healthy” is as if wishing that the pendulum could stop moving in mid-air. It’s a rhythm, like day and night. We don’t say “We want to eradicate night and purify the Earth until we will live in a permanent state of daylight.” We rather say that we want to work to bring consciousness into sleep. The same goes for health and illness: they are phases of one and the same process, which has to take its course. Our ambition should be to grow in consciousness inside it as a whole, not to eradicate half of it. What complicates things a lot is that such course is not always symptomatic in a way that makes us feel “I am sick”, and never intelligible through biology alone. For example, we discussed a few months ago how the forces of growth - that in lower animals account for a regrown limb, tail, or head - become to a large extent forces of consciousness in man (which is why we can’t regrow functional parts). At the 7-year mark, the last burst of these forces is the outpouring of the second dentition. That’s a spectacular event, if you think about it, kind of like a plenaria regrowing a head. But then the child stops dreaming, starts thinking, and those anabolic forces of growth are exhausted to a large extent, for the rest of earthly life, to pass into the catabolism of head activity. This is at the same time a healing and a sickening process. It’s healing because, if the growing forces were to keep pushing in the grown-up body, they would favor tumor-like growth (which indeed happens when, due to any number of concomitant micro-factors, those forces are not appropriately transmuted into consciousness, which indeed stand at the origin of certain cancers appearing in adult life). And it is also an illness process, because the head forces emerging from it are death forces. In particular, they are degrading, poisoning forces towards the metabolic system. Our metabolism is literally sickened by what we do with our head. Hence it put forth its counter measures - and so on and do forth, and the dance of health and illness keeps unfolding. The same processes are both healing and sickening, and we can see clearly from the example how it would make no sense to say that a purified soul would allow the Initiate to freeze this process, eradicate illness from it, and only stick to the healthy side. The same applies to all other processes that constitute the human organization within the earthly spectrum.

This said, soul purification - and everything else the soul does - definitely makes a difference in the patterns of health and illness, since it changes the organization of the sheaths, and how they interact with the spectrums of cosmic and telluric forces. For sure, there are infinite ways to make the pendulum swings more harmonious, in the now and in the future. But these evolving interactions remain dynamic (pendulum-like) and steered by certain patterns. These patterns are moreover collective to a certain extent. But the key point is that we need these patterns of reciprocation. There’s no anabolism without catabolism, no build-up without destruction, and no health without illness. This becomes clear once these concepts are revised in accordance with the nature of man as microcosm of the Cosmos, and in accordance with the reciprocal relation linking man and the kingdoms of nature.

Yes, illness is what happens when we need to micromanage the partial transitions between native states of health. As we know, healing would never happen if we weren't dipping into the wellspring of Life every night. What is the process of initiation? It is awakening within the period of sleep and more consciously conducting the sources of Life into the Earthly spectrum. The rhythmic dance that you speak of thus transforms, and not only in some trivial way. The very experience of Time transforms and what was experienced as long, drawn out partial transitions between healthy states becomes a more superfluid transformation. The head forces become less and less death forces, and more and more forces of restoring Life. All of this can be intimately experienced on the initiatory path, even during a single incarnation (within various karmic constraints, of course). It is precisely because the head learns to reintegrate the growth forces that were separated off in early childhood. It is not a question of 'freezing' the reciprocal processes, but transfiguring them at deeper and deeper levels of integration.

What Steiner comments below is not mere metaphor or imprecise 'pre-Anthroposophical' categorization, but quite literal and precise, rooted in supersensible perception.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA068d/E ... 06p01.html

Just as colors, tones and very specific thought complexes are used for the recovery of the person, because they evoke very specific processes in the person. For example, it has a very specific influence on a person whether he indulges in ideas that are linked to reality. Today, one is instructed to use, as far as possible, ideas that are only a photographic image of reality. These are the most unhealthy. Those ideas that are in the realm of natural science kill the human spirit all the more, the more central they are, and the consequence is that the human being cannot overcome the physical body, and the further consequence is that this or that illness must occur. In contrast, ideas that are produced by the spirit itself have an invigorating effect. When imaginative thinking takes place in a lawful way, it is healing. Directing attention in the right way is also health-giving. This is of tremendous importance, for no person can suffer from a digestive disorder, for example, who is filled with such interest. And such interest can only be evoked by the whole world appearing before us, guided and directed by the spiritual.

When humanity will one day realize that educating oneself about the riddles of existence pours all the vitality into our soul and gives such joy and pleasure that no storms can change it, then one will understand that spiritual science itself is the original remedy for all diseases. Those who do not want to come to it will rush from one impression to another and get bored. Nothing is more unhealthy than this rushing about. When the correctly guided interest of life goes to the center, then there is neither boredom in the world nor rushing from one sensory impression to another. The one who is guided by spiritual science finds something interesting in even the smallest thing. One does not always have to beg the outside world to interest me. - Because one finds a source within oneself that creates interest. And this makes the person healthy.

I hope we can agree now that this second issue has been addressed too. Astral purification cannot alone drive full etheric harmonization, and etheric harmonization is far from being the only factor behind the dynamics of the healing-sickening process. These movements of life that organize the becoming of the human being - or seen from another side, the becoming of the natural world - are indeed complex. These are the same core dynamics that characterize the functioning of the earthly spectrum and I guess there is no way around this complexity. The same diversity of form and movement we find in the wise tableau of earthly nature is at play in the human organization as well, to characterize the manifold nature of the pendulum swings in the rhythm of healing and becoming ill again. By the way, here is a question, that I am leaving open, in relation to: “if a person can take a pill and release a bunch of 'anthrobots' into his bloodstream that build him a new liver, then he wouldn't be learning any inner lessons from conducting his spiritual activity in such a way that he destroyed the old one”: If instead of an anthrobots treatment you give a patient, say, arsenicum album, or another anthroposophycal remedy, would the patient learn any inner lessons from their conduct?

Hopefully I have hinted by now at the reasons why I believe we cannot reduce this question to extreme simplicity, and what the reasons are for the coexistence of illness and the development of the consciousness soul, for some long time to come, and granted that the now can be expanded, as said. Regarding the Steiner quote - again, a pre-Anthroposophy quote that addresses the question at a different level of granularity compared to the one we were at - sure, there is no denying that soul work has an effect on the quality of the pendulum swings, at individual and collective level, and that whoever sows wind will harvest storm. Materialism and other astral excesses make the collective pendulum go crazy, so to say, requiring proportionate countermeasures. But even the countermeasures will not be final, and will inevitably pass into excess at some point, substantiating the need for the subsequent wave of reciprocation, along the health and illness axis. I agree that at some future point all these waves will have to be brought into complete phase, but that’s when as planetary incarnation will subside. And no Initiate can make it subside here and now by pure force of higher cognition, meditation, and soul purification.

That's a good question. Such a form of medicine can also become counterproductive to inner transformation, if it is treated as yet another end-user technology that we can passively consume to fix all our problems. Steiner himself always emphasized that such remedies can only be effective in a long-term and healthy way if both the doctor and patient participate with their inner being in its preparation and administration. Anthroposophical medicine should become, first and foremost, a means of inspiring the germinal capacities of healing within each soul. It should stimulate souls to take a more active interest in the dynamics of their organic life and the ways in which their spiritual activity feeds back into their inner states. Without that inspiration and stimulation, it would indeed become another decadent form of short-term symptom relief that does very little to promote sustainable and integrating paths of healing.

I don't think the issues have been addressed, and hopefully what was written above can throw some clarity on why.

[Federica]

Ashvin, the dance I have described is neither binary nor static. It’s a progressive movement towards integration and alignment of the waves. I am not sure how you were able to read the opposite of what I wrote.

And of course, the described processes are indeed synonymous with life processes, as I have indicated explicitly in my post. I have called them so, but for some reason you keep reading what is not there, and are blind to what is there. Then, through this deviated focus, you let go into oblivion the crucial points. Your inexplicable tirade about "Life" detracts attention from the real points I made, which have received no real comment. And your answer to the question I posed about anthrobots is absolutely unsatisfactory. The question was meant to orient to the fact that your reasoning about Levin stemmed from an unsatisfactory understanding of illness. But instead of looking in that direction, you prefer to twist Steiner, to make him say in your imagination what would confirm your viewpoint...............

It is not true at all that “Steiner himself always emphasized that such remedies can only be effective in a long-term and healthy way if both the doctor and patient participate with their inner being in its preparation and administration.” You should be more careful making such false statements. It would suffice to look at Steiner's explanation of mental illness, for example, and how it should be treated physically, to immediately disprove your statement once and for all. I won’t go into details, it would be manifestly useless.

A few posts ago you did the same, you stated that Steiner said that “there will come a time when outer beauty more explicitly reflects inner health”. This is also not true, and by the way I am still waiting to see where he supposedly did that. Instead of providing a quote, when I invited you to share it, you came up with another tirade that I should not rely on Steiners quotes so much.… no comment.......... I will be waiting for the phantom quotes for the rest of time, probably. That's fine.

The situation is, in my opinion, that you don’t understand what illness is, and, more importantly, you don’t want to understand it. Allright, that’s ok with me.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, the dance I have described is neither binary nor static. It’s a progressive movement towards integration and alignment of the waves. I am not sure how you were able to read the opposite of what I wrote.

And of course, the described processes are indeed synonymous with life processes, as I have indicated explicitly in my post. I have called them so, but for some reason you keep reading what is not there, and are blind to what is there. Then, through this deviated focus, you let go into oblivion the crucial points. Your inexplicable tirade about "Life" detracts attention from the real points I made, which have received no real comment. And your answer to the question I posed about anthrobots is absolutely unsatisfactory. The question was meant to orient to the fact that your reasoning about Levin stemmed from an unsatisfactory understanding of illness. But instead of looking in that direction, you prefer to twist Steiner, to make him say in your imagination what would confirm your viewpoint...............

It is not true at all that “Steiner himself always emphasized that such remedies can only be effective in a long-term and healthy way if both the doctor and patient participate with their inner being in its preparation and administration.” You should be more careful making such false statements. It would suffice to look at Steiner's explanation of mental illness, for example, and how it should be treated physically, to immediately disprove your statement once and for all. I won’t go into details, it would be manifestly useless.

A few posts ago you did the same, you stated that Steiner said that “there will come a time when outer beauty more explicitly reflects inner health”. This is also not true, and by the way I am still waiting to see where he supposedly did that. Instead of providing a quote, when I invited you to share it, you came up with another tirade that I should not rely on Steiners quotes so much.… no comment.......... I will be waiting for the phantom quotes for the rest of time, probably. That's fine.

The situation is, in my opinion, that you don’t understand what illness is, and, more importantly, you don’t want to understand it. Allright, that’s ok with me.

Ok, Federica. Judging by your quick response, it seems unlikely you even read the last post carefully.

It's frankly quite troubling that you are have started questioning the phenomenological foundations and, more importantly, seem to have no interest in regaining a proper orientation. We have seen this always happens when you get attached to a faulty opinion - since the opinion cannot be supported by the principles of experience or spiritual evolution more broadly, you get trapped in increasingly abstract, rigid, and discursive arguments which paint a static picture of humanity and evolution. The more this is drawn to your attention, the more frustrated and obstinate you become in your responses. You can say it is "not static" all you want, but it obviously is.

It is equally troubling that you are completely dismissing Steiner's quotes, his plain words and meaning across multiple lectures, by categorizing them as "pre-Anthroposophical" and such. That is also born out of your attachment to a faulty and fundamentally indefensible opinion. Such an attachment is causing you to misunderstand what Anthroposophy is, even reducing it to physical ways of addressing illness that don't involve the whole human soul and its participation.

The connection between moral development, outer beauty, and health is quite simple and obvious once we adopt a phenomenological perspective. Even you admitted the connection between moral development and outer beauty in the future. Then I presented reasoning and quotes establishing a similar connection between moral development and health. Are we really unable to translate this into an intuition of the inner connection between beauty and health? Do we really need Steiner to spell everything out for us before we take a tiny step forward with our intuitive activity? When we conceive of the earthly spectrum as something fixed in the current conditions, as something that necessarily and universally incorporates error, illness, etc., as you are clearly doing, we are failing to drive the evolution of this spectrum forward. The way we orient our imaginative thinking faculty toward the latent possibilities of this spectrum is precisely what the current evolutionary process hinges on, as initiates like Steiner took pains to emphasize over and over again.

[AshvinP]

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA096/En ... 15p01.html

Much that will be discussed this Winter will become more intelligible to us when we learn of certain more intimate karmic connections, for example the difference between the karma of a beautiful and an ugly human being. What is the karma of a beautiful human being? Something comes into consideration there that at first seems incredible, nevertheless it is a fact. Beauty of the physical body is in many cases, not always but very often, a consequence of suffering endured in the preceding life. Suffering in the preceding life—physical and also soul-suffering—becomes beauty in a subsequent life, beauty of the external physical body. In these cases, it is permissible to use an analogy which I have often applied. How does the beautiful pearl in a pearl-oyster originate? Actually, as the result of an illness. Approximately speaking, therefore, there is a karmic process which represents the connection of illness, of suffering, with beauty. This beauty is often bought at the cost of suffering and illness.

If this is not completely dismissed, then it may be said that it points to the opposite of what was stated before. Well, the point is first to recognize there is a deeper inner connection between these things - it is not arbitrary to link them together. Then we can see how, as illustrated before, illness and suffering serve the inner function of strengthening our soul forces and becoming more sensitive to our deviations from the ideal. As the evolutionary process continues to integrate around the kernel of moral development, the soul will learn to strengthen its sensitivity to the ideal trajectory even through its healthy and non-suffering states. That is one of the chief functions of developing a positive soul attitude, gratitude for daily experiences, equanimity, and so on - to discover the soul strength to continue inwardly developing even when things are running smoothly.

[Cleric]

Rather, if illness were progressively eliminated in this way that you say, you would become too healthy. That would not be viable long term, some of your sheaths would be too loose, you would subtly approach vegetative life in some areas, maybe you would become insensitive to this or that, and illness would be called forth, in a way or another, by the same processes that had brought you to excessive health. Health is not an equilibrium in itself. Through oscillating between health and illness, we operate those necessary movements through which we can refine our consciousness and evolve. That's how I see it at this point.

Such oscillations certainly serve such purpose now, as humanity is too thick-headed and can only understand from the stick, so to speak. But even from a conventional perspective, most of the diseases are long in the making before they become known to us as pain (thus the modern emphasis on regular preventive examinations). BD has said that gradually doctors will deal less and less with healing diseases, but rather with warning the patients of how they are on the way to manifesting them. These diagnostics will no longer be purely physical examinations. As such, healers will once again (as it has been in the past) be the highly spiritual figures in society, and they'll be more like instructors (not only in physical best practices but also in the spiritual order). Every healing recipe will consist mainly of concrete advice about where our ways of life are misaligned, and thus, most of the healing will be self-healing. And this is not that far into the future. Even now, there's growing awareness that most of the diseases with the greatest death toll are completely preventable through proper nutrition and physical activity. This is still on a quite physical level, but it's not difficult to see how this gradually begins to address the soul life too. Once again, even now, there's emphasis on stress management, positive thinking, etc. These are completely elementary things compared to the deeper spiritual knowledge, but it is nevertheless some preliminary sign that the way forward is in raising consciousness and not allowing disease to manifest in the first place.

Now you may say that these trivial cases are obvious, and were we to rectify them, we'll reach precisely the stagnant inner life; thus, for the deeper spiritual processes we would still need the feedback of disease. This, however, would be quite a pessimistic view of what the human soul and spirit will be able to do from now on. In fact, if it goes unchecked, it becomes an inner obstacle. It's like saying that there are certain things in the spiritual depths of existence that are bound to remain behind an unpenetrable veil, and we'll learn to navigate them only indirectly through the feedback of disease. But when humanity becomes more and more healthy overall (in body and soul), then even the errors in moral life will be quickly accompanied by a kind of Imaginative premonition, as if we glimpse how the flow of becoming will roll down if we preserve the current curvature (Steiner has spoken about that). As a matter of fact, such sensitivity can (and should) be developed even today. It is as if a deeper level of our conscientious being always rings in consonance or dissonance with our decisions. If we observe ourselves closely, we'll almost without failing discover that we do not want to listen for such subtle indications (simply because in most cases they seem to oppose our more immediate desires).

So you are right that feedback will still be needed if we are to continue our refinement and evolution, but it would be a great misfortune if we need to wait for a disease to manifest all the way to becoming known as pain and disability for us to recognize the feedback and work our way back to the errors. Instead, the feedback will need to be grasped still at the level of Imagination, where we experience visions of the future we are preparing (if we allow the higher worlds to Inspire us).

[Federica]

Rather, if illness were progressively eliminated in this way that you say, you would become too healthy. That would not be viable long term, some of your sheaths would be too loose, you would subtly approach vegetative life in some areas, maybe you would become insensitive to this or that, and illness would be called forth, in a way or another, by the same processes that had brought you to excessive health. Health is not an equilibrium in itself. Through oscillating between health and illness, we operate those necessary movements through which we can refine our consciousness and evolve. That's how I see it at this point.

Such oscillations certainly serve such purpose now, as humanity is too thick-headed and can only understand from the stick, so to speak. But even from a conventional perspective, most of the diseases are long in the making before they become known to us as pain (thus the modern emphasis on regular preventive examinations). BD has said that gradually doctors will deal less and less with healing diseases, but rather with warning the patients of how they are on the way to manifesting them. These diagnostics will no longer be purely physical examinations. As such, healers will once again (as it has been in the past) be the highly spiritual figures in society, and they'll be more like instructors (not only in physical best practices but also in the spiritual order). Every healing recipe will consist mainly of concrete advice about where our ways of life are misaligned, and thus, most of the healing will be self-healing. And this is not that far into the future. Even now, there's growing awareness that most of the diseases with the greatest death toll are completely preventable through proper nutrition and physical activity. This is still on a quite physical level, but it's not difficult to see how this gradually begins to address the soul life too. Once again, even now, there's emphasis on stress management, positive thinking, etc. These are completely elementary things compared to the deeper spiritual knowledge, but it is nevertheless some preliminary sign that the way forward is in raising consciousness and not allowing disease to manifest in the first place.

Now you may say that these trivial cases are obvious, and were we to rectify them, we'll reach precisely the stagnant inner life; thus, for the deeper spiritual processes we would still need the feedback of disease. This, however, would be quite a pessimistic view of what the human soul and spirit will be able to do from now on. In fact, if it goes unchecked, it becomes an inner obstacle. It's like saying that there are certain things in the spiritual depths of existence that are bound to remain behind an unpenetrable veil, and we'll learn to navigate them only indirectly through the feedback of disease. But when humanity becomes more and more healthy overall (in body and soul), then even the errors in moral life will be quickly accompanied by a kind of Imaginative premonition, as if we glimpse how the flow of becoming will roll down if we preserve the current curvature (Steiner has spoken about that). As a matter of fact, such sensitivity can (and should) be developed even today. It is as if a deeper level of our conscientious being always rings in consonance or dissonance with our decisions. If we observe ourselves closely, we'll almost without failing discover that we do not want to listen for such subtle indications (simply because in most cases they seem to oppose our more immediate desires).

So you are right that feedback will still be needed if we are to continue our refinement and evolution, but it would be a great misfortune if we need to wait for a disease to manifest all the way to becoming known as pain and disability for us to recognize the feedback and work our way back to the errors. Instead, the feedback will need to be grasped still at the level of Imagination, where we experience visions of the future we are preparing (if we allow the higher worlds to Inspire us).

It’s a pity that you have written your entire post on a “now you may say” hypothesis. Yet, it is not difficult to see from my last two/three posts what I may say about disease. “Too healthy” has to be read in the context of what I write, not in the context of what I did not write (I did not write that feedback will still be needed), or what I may say. I have specifically not referred to illness as feedback, or punishment - a consequence of wrongdoing that hits us to let us know that we did wrong. No doubt, there are also those "illnesses" which are more like self-injury and can be prevented by, well, avoiding self-injury - for sure - and I already acknowledged the role of karma in accidents and illness, but what seems missing to me in the understanding of illness that focuses on feedback and karma alone is that the nature of the earthly spectrum, within which man has developed consciousness of 'otherness' as a consequence of the Fall, is at the root of the fully integrated nature of disease in the human "healthy" organization. Steiner tried to bring about this understanding, but when someone says that illness and death have to be "eradicated", well, it seems the premises to grow in consciosuness within the nature of illness are not there.

What I meant by the “excessive health” sentence you quoted above is that the plethora of processes that keep the human organization rolling are all at the same time processes of health and processes of illness, reciprocating each other continuously, in a pendulum-like way. It’s ingrained in the human organization. Not that health is normal, and disease is an exogenous feedback that hits us from without. And I have presented illness not as a feedback, but as indissociable from the very processes that keep us incarnated. I am somewhat confused, because I thought I had elaborated clearly about that, even providing an example of such processes, out of the many possible. So I’m unsure what to do with your post, frankly. As Steiner says, it’s not that there are normal, healthy processes in the human organization, and then disease comes in. Rather, every process is healing in one direction and simultaneously disease-generating in another direction. For this reason I said that the way forward is, as I see it, to grow in consciousness on both sides of each process, rather than wishing to eradicate half of it to prevent disease from manifesting. The disease is prevented when it is understood as a 'normal' human process that has overshot its mark. That’s the consciousness that needs to grow: how the processes of the human organization work into each other, and how the sheaths participate in all those processes working into each other. Without such consciousness of the workings of health and illness as reciprocating swings of the same pendulum, the thread cannot be found that connects soul activity and manifestation of disease.

Like healing, getting sick is not a condition or a state, but a dynamic process that allows the human organization to continually rebalance itself and pursue life, be it within or across any given incarnational rhythm. In this way, the point of balance is not in a supposedly healthy state. The balance arises from the constant reciprocation of forces - a character of the earthly spectrum - that tend towards health at one swing of the pendulum, and toward illness at the next. It can’t be a static balance. Wishing to “eradicate illness” and blissfully “remain healthy” is as if wishing that the pendulum could stop moving in mid-air. It’s a rhythm, like day and night. We don’t say “We want to eradicate night and purify the Earth until we will live in a permanent state of daylight.” We rather say that we want to work to bring consciousness into sleep. The same goes for health and illness: they are phases of one and the same process, which has to take its course. Our ambition should be to grow in consciousness inside it as a whole, not to eradicate half of it. What complicates things a lot is that such course is not always symptomatic in a way that makes us feel “I am sick”, and never intelligible through biology alone. For example, we discussed a few months ago how the forces of growth - that in lower animals account for a regrown limb, tail, or head - become to a large extent forces of consciousness in man (which is why we can’t regrow functional parts). At the 7-year mark, the last burst of these forces is the outpouring of the second dentition. That’s a spectacular event, if you think about it, kind of like a plenaria regrowing a head. But then the child stops dreaming, starts thinking, and those anabolic forces of growth are exhausted to a large extent, for the rest of earthly life, to pass into the catabolism of head activity. This is at the same time a healing and a sickening process. It’s healing because, if the growing forces were to keep pushing in the grown-up body, they would favor tumor-like growth (which indeed happens when, due to any number of concomitant micro-factors, those forces are not appropriately transmuted into consciousness, which indeed stand at the origin of certain cancers appearing in adult life). And it is also an illness process, because the head forces emerging from it are death forces. In particular, they are degrading, poisoning forces towards the metabolic system. Our metabolism is literally sickened by what we do with our head. Hence it put forth its counter measures - and so on and do forth, and the dance of health and illness keeps unfolding. The same processes are both healing and sickening, and we can see clearly from the example how it would make no sense to say that a purified soul would allow the Initiate to freeze this process, eradicate illness from it, and only stick to the healthy side. The same applies to all other processes that constitute the human organization within the earthly spectrum.

This said, soul purification - and everything else the soul does - definitely makes a difference in the patterns of health and illness, since it changes the organization of the sheaths, and how they interact with the spectrums of cosmic and telluric forces. For sure, there are infinite ways to make the pendulum swings more harmonious, in the now and in the future. But these evolving interactions remain dynamic (pendulum-like) and steered by certain patterns.

[Cleric]

It’s a pity that you have written your entire post on a “now you may say” hypothesis. Yet, it is not difficult to see from my last two/three posts what I may say about disease. “Too healthy” has to be read in the context of what I write, not in the context of what I did not write (I did not write that feedback will still be needed), or what I may say. I have specifically not referred to illness as feedback, or punishment - a consequence of wrongdoing that hits us to let us know that we did wrong. No doubt, there are also those "illnesses" which are more like self-injury and can be prevented by, well, avoiding self-injury - for sure - and I already acknowledged the role of karma in accidents and illness, but what seems missing to me in the understanding of illness that focuses on feedback and karma alone is that the nature of the earthly spectrum, within which man has developed consciousness of 'otherness' as a consequence of the Fall, is at the root of the fully integrated nature of disease in the human "healthy" organization. Steiner tried to bring about this understanding, but when someone says that illness and death have to be "eradicated", well, it seems the premises to grow in consciosuness within the nature of illness are not there.

What I meant by the “excessive health” sentence you quoted above is that the plethora of processes that keep the human organization rolling are all at the same time processes of health and processes of illness, reciprocating each other continuously, in a pendulum-like way. It’s ingrained in the human organization. Not that health is normal, and disease is an exogenous feedback that hits us from without. And I have presented illness not as a feedback, but as indissociable from the very processes that keep us incarnated. I am somewhat confused, because I thought I had elaborated clearly about that, even providing an example of such processes, out of the many possible. So I’m unsure what to do with your post, frankly. As Steiner says, it’s not that there are normal, healthy processes in the human organization, and then disease comes in. Rather, every process is healing in one direction and simultaneously disease-generating in another direction. For this reason I said that the way forward is, as I see it, to grow in consciousness on both sides of each process, rather than wishing to eradicate half of it to prevent disease from manifesting. The disease is prevented when it is understood as a 'normal' human process that has overshot its mark. That’s the consciousness that needs to grow: how the processes of the human organization work into each other, and how the sheaths participate in all those processes working into each other. Without such consciousness of the workings of health and illness as reciprocating swings of the same pendulum, the thread cannot be found that connects soul activity and manifestation of disease.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, but let's expand the context a little more. My apologies if this is what you meant all along.

Taking the cross symbol that you introduced, it's not only the polarity that is important, but also the fact that we have horizontal and vertical aspects. Some time ago, I used the following image to clarify horizontal and vertical polarities to Lou (without much success )



If we speak about health-disease as a horizontal polarity, it is obvious that they are part of a dynamic system. Then, the one-sided pursuit of health (and the belief that the other pole can be eradicated) would be precisely what you warn about. The clearest example would be the materialistic pursuit of health, which in its end goal is the achievement of physical immortality. But we can also count the more new-agey pursuit of health, which still lacks the insight into the evolutionary process (and rather one expects to be evacuated from Gaia after their mission is done). I think we all agree that such a one-sided view on health is completely detrimental.

Yet, the dynamic horizontal interplay can only be rightly understood in the context of the vertical polarity. While in the horizontal polarity it can be said that we need to balance between the two poles (to avoid one-sidedness), the vertical polarity is different in that it signifies the great ebb and flow of existence - descent and ascent, involution and evolution, etc. As such, ever since the Central Event of human evolution, we're on the ascending path and will be so all the way to Pralaya. This means that a kind of vertical 'one-sidedness' is actually the norm in our case. We need 'one-sided' striving toward the Good, Life, Love, Wisdom, Truth, and so on - that is, the High Ideal. One may ask: but what about balance? This is not something that we need to worry about. It is enough to simply start orienting toward the summit. All the resistance will be there, even without asking for it. We're moving upstream. The counteracting drag will be there even if we do not want it. So there's no real danger of one-sidedness here. Of course, if we seek the summit only to feel good, to put our conscience to sleep by convincing ourselves that we are good, then obviously this turns into a horizontal polarity.

Such misunderstanding of horizontal and vertical, most often occurs in the context of good and evil. Today, it's almost a matter of fashion to say that good and evil are scales of a balance, and it is foolish if we try to eradicate evil. While this is true in the horizontal sense, we commit a serious error if we believe that it is within ourselves that we must balance good and evil. This leads to a very peculiar philosophy, where we believe that we must consciously do evil from time to time in order to avoid dangerous 'one-sidedness'. However, as soon as we attempt to direct toward the vertical Good, there's no need to do anything to balance it out - we'll have enough difficulties dragging us down as it is.

So, if we are to make proper sense of these things, we need to be clear about the two aspects. Our primary striving should be 'one-sidedly' toward the high ideal, which is not something that we can place our finger on and approach but, but the continuous shedding of the old and accommodating the new. Proper balance of the horizontal can only be accomplished in the light of the vertical striving. That is, our striving toward the summit (singularity) is what elucidates the horizontal imbalances and guides their dynamic interplay toward harmonization. As such, we can distinguish between the horizontal pursuit of health, and the vertical striving for the True Health, the Life Abundant - that which the Christ came to gift us with. When seeking the latter in the true way, there's no need to be worried of becoming 'too healthy'. It's only that what we receive freely, we must give freely. And, of course, it is this striving toward the high ideal that will gradually harmonize the horizontal oscillations to such an extent that they will no longer appear as disease and death.