I want to start with something that I intended to write earlier in connection with the perfection of the intellectual soul and the role of the Church, but I felt that at that point it would only add to the crossfire. Naturally, our experience of the intellectual and spiritual souls is bound to be a little mushy initially. We can present this like this:
To truly differentiate these two aspects, however, we would have to consider the stream of German Idealism. This historical process is the image of the ‘sharpening’ of the intellectual self, reaching its zenith in Hegel, where the whole of reality is seen in pure thought. Note – this doesn’t mean pure theory, but the pure
experience of thought. This is the ‘stuff’ of reality, so to speak.
Effectively, to reach that point, we need to consider what was quoted by Federica earlier:
RS wrote:It is the true fulfillment of what men were seeking in the time now past, in the last third of the Nineteenth Century—true freedom—freedom in their conception of the world, in their research and even in their opinions.
We should take a moment to appreciate what this implies. It means that we need to peel away even our deeper convictions, like the belief in God. This is important: we may believe that because we have spiritual thoughts and feel that our thought life condenses from within a deeper stratum of existence, we have overcome the intellectual soul. It’s far more likely, however, that we’re still in the mushy state depicted above. One can be quite an occultist but still be very instinctive in their thinking. To truly differentiate these stages of inner life, we need to pass, as if through a pinhole, where we’re basically
reduced to naked and alone thought-being in universal phenomenal space. We can depict this in the following way:
So it is the stream of German Idealism that, in a way, has brought the intellectual soul from a blurry blob to a crisp point (in the way that light rays can be brought from a blurry spot to a laser-like point, by adjusting the lens focus). Then, it is PoF that actually steps across the pinhole and gradually begins to substantiate the lower cone from above. Only now we can gradually turn from a being that thinks instinctively about reality (from the background as it were) to reality’s actual process of becoming.
Now, let’s move forward and see that this mushy region is actually much more treacherous than we may imagine. On what foundation does VT build a work like MoT? Quite obviously, on the stream of Hermeticism. It is a vast topic if we are to get into the full details of the latter, but in very broad lines, we may say that it basically preserves and nourishes Wisdom that took form in the Egyptian period, but has necessarily been rechewed many times through the millennia. Most importantly, this Wisdom has been accommodated in a special way in the last millennium, in the age of the ripening intellectual soul. This has proliferated in the branches of Kabbalah, magic, alchemy, and astrology, that is, in the various forms of Western occultism.
Let’s try to get a really living experience of the structure of all this. For example, what are the Arcana? To get a truer understanding, we need to move beyond definitions and into actual deeper experience. So when we speak of an arcanum in the deep sense (and not only of the symbolic precipitation), we need to loosen from the bodily spectrum and be fully active in soul space. In a sense, we must find the degrees of freedom in our soul body, such as to assume various ‘soul asanas’. These don't imply static geometric forms but must be grasped in their temporal nature, as ways in which destiny can be patterned. As a rough analogy, we can imagine how the airplane’s control surfaces – the ailerons, elevators, rudder, flaps – change their positions and thus experience various forces and torques against the airflow. In a similar way, when through our conscious activity we meditate on an arcanum, we assume a specific configuration of our soul’s ‘control surfaces’ and as a result experience the ‘rubbing’ of becoming in specific ways. This is critical to understand. We should move away from the spatial domination and grasp things more in the sense of the video feedback metaphor – our activity is written down and is recursively embedded in the phenomenal configuration of reality. As such, the arcana reveal specific patterns and lawfulnesses – how certain soul activities play out in the flow of destiny.
There’s no theory here, no mental models – we’re truly living like an expanded fluid in soul space and investigating how our inner intents bend the flow, how they are resisted or assisted. In this way, the arcana can be grasped as basic patterns of inner gesture and feedback in soul space. These patterns form a kind of
axiomatic basis.
Here, we should get one thing clear. Just because we’re freed from the sensory spectrum and live in true soul (or dream) space, it doesn’t mean that we have transcended the intellectual soul. We can live in the astral with our intellectual soul or even sentient soul. This is also why they are called ‘souls’. We shouldn’t
equate the intellectual soul with the brain-bound intellect. When we live in the Hermetic Wisdom in the astral, we metamorphose through the axiomatic arcanic patterns. This is very similar to the way we live with our intellect in the axiomatic patterns of formal logic or mathematics. In fact, the latter can be considered a more condensed version (intersected with the bodily spectrum) of what we live through in the intellectual soul in purely astral space. So, what is definitive about the life of the intellectual soul is not the manipulation of mental images in our mind, but the transformations from soul asana to soul asana. The latter give us a stable form in astral space, just like we feel as a stable functioning ego when we metamorphose from thought to thought.
Western occultism in the last millennium revolves around these astral experiences. They are expressed symbolically. Obviously, such symbols are always in danger of remaining completely abstract, as is often the case in popular astrology and Kabbalah, where the soul metamorphoses have been reduced to a form of calculation. In this respect, VT performs outstandingly to continuously lead the aspirant toward the true inner experience of the arcana.
Yet, we should feel how the Hermetic Wisdom is still basically dominated by the intellectual soul. I repeat that this doesn’t in the least imply that this Wisdom is abstract and brain-bound! Not at all. However, we must be conscious that we can be in a full-blown astral space and still experience things as shaped by the intellectual soul. It is not that our soul is filled with abstract intellectual tokens, but that our soul metamorphoses from state into state, in a kind of
choreography of arcanic asanas. If we ask, “How do I transform from one arcanic asana to another?”, we would feel that this is the essential nature of what intellectual thinking is. In our ordinary intellect we also transform from asana to asana, except that most of the soul depth is completely unconscious. We are aware only the symbolic extract at the tip of our focus – the mental image that symbolizes the whole hidden soul context.
All of this amounts to the following warning: just because we are in full-blown astral experience, we shouldn’t imagine that we grasp the soul world in some 'objective' form. And this goes much deeper than the standard warnings for the possible illusions proceeding from our unprocessed desires and traits of character (of which Hermeticism is fully aware).
To see what we’re talking about, consider the following. What would the Hermeticist say when asked, “What is the origin of the arcana?” The answer is clear and correct – these are the archetypal manifestations of the Divine Mind. However, if we try to feel this with the needed depth (and not only as a general truth), we’ll have to admit that in that region we’re already bordering on the inexplicable, on the mysterious. It is not that Hermeticism postulates this bordering as some hard Kantian divide. Far from it. Hermeticism is evolutionary open. Yet, this mysterious region is the kind of upper bound to which Western occultism
effectively reaches. How this mysterious core is experienced and looked upon depends on whether the flavor of Hermeticism is Christ-oriented (like with VT) or is Christless (like in Bardon). In any case, we can schematically represent things in this way:
Please note once again that what we present here concerns true supersensible experience – actual existence in the soul strata of reality. Nevertheless, it also strangely resembles the way we grasp our intellectual life. And this shouldn’t be surprising in the face of what has been described so far. In our thinking life we build a kind of mental fractal, starting with some fundamental (axiomatic) concepts and building on them into the manifold language. Something analogous happens in the Hermetic experience of the supersensible, except that it is translated into true soul space. The Arcanic soul asanas are like the axioms or letters of existence (the God given building blocks), and the details of creation are like tracing these axiomatic patterns into their manifold interplays. This is why this stage of initiation is called (including by Steiner) learning to read the occult script.
If we try to get behind the axioms of mathematics, through the axioms, we fail. Anything that we derive from them throws us into the manifold combinations. In the same way, we cannot shift to Imagination by simply doing more intellectual thinking. This is a core flavor of the Hermetic soul stance. To move away from the manifoldness and abstraction, we seek our being in the Arcanic soul asanas. However, we cannot reach behind these asanas by
applying them (transforming through them) in new combinations. This leads us down into manifoldness again. Thus, the Christ-oriented hermeticism seeks the mystical union with the Logos as the only sensible way to reach deeper into the origin of the Arcane. The whole question now is, can we even say something about that experience?
In 1879 something significant takes place. It’s not about the personality of Rudolf Steiner, but about the recognition of an objective milestone in the collective development of humanity. Now Wisdom pours Inspiratively from the spiritual worlds in a way that the spiritual soul can grasp. We should be clear that we’re dealing with something
new here. Even the old Rosicrucians, who were also largely in the Hermetic stream but brought the realization of the Christ impulse to the highest levels possible at the time, were still dominated by the intellectual soul and its Arcanic asanas.
To make the transition to the new and higher form of cognition, we need to consider in full seriousness the needed inner
inversion on which Steiner was always stressing (for example,
here, where it is called ‘reversal’). Not only that we need to understand what this means, but we also should very clearly understand why it clashes with the disposition of the intellectual soul.
To understand this transition, we need to consider the two cones touching at the tip in full seriousness. If we proceed from within the Hermetic stream, we’re primed to expect the spiritual soul to manifest as some even more unified wholeness, which allows us to live in the mysterious core. But in reality, something seemingly opposite happens. Our soul is torn apart. Instead of monolithic unity, it becomes the arena of
multiplicity of beings. This is the critical thing. If we consider everything only from within the intellectual soul (I repeat – even if we are in full-blown Cosmic experience, metamorphosing through Arcanic soul-asanas), this multiplicity will immediately be
mistaken for something threatening, as something dragging us down to the secondary, tertiary, etc., manifoldness of the Arcane.
Now consider what happens when the initiate in this new domain of experience precipitates concepts and communicates them? Well, in the first approximation, they’ll be seen as mere intellectual metaphysics. For the hermeticist, this ‘initiate’ is delving into the secondary, tertiary, etc. manifoldness. He hasn’t even reached the major Arcana! Those who are a little more positively predisposed (as VT is) would say, “I completely accept this as valid and maybe even correct
etheric vision. However, as far as the depths of the soul are concerned, we need to retrace our existence through the major Arcana and into the mystical union with the Logos.” In other words, the hermeticist of the second millennium would have a hard time conceiving that going beyond the Arcanic asanas would present highly manifold experiences.
At the heart of the Michaelic impulse is the gaining of consciousness within the upper cone, where we increasingly grasp our being as a point of balance within Cosmic multiplicity. Of course, this multiplicity is
not manifoldness of
images (i.e, it’s not external multiplicity). It is the differentiation of the currents of our innermost life, which prove to be gathered from all over the Cosmos. For example, one of the first Michaelic Inspirations is the realization that in our soul life, the Lu-Christ-Ahr streams intermingle. Again – not as some abstract idea, but as actual differentiation (as if Michael’s sword does the differentiation of the threads) of our innermost spiritual life. Such an actual experience can only be had once we pass the inversion point into multiplicity. Conversely, if we are at the threshold of the Arcane and expect that the next step will be the mystical union with the Logos, we practically exclude the upper cone and expect that the lower cone will have an ever-tighter tip. Needless to say, this precludes us from having true understanding of our deeper spiritual being (beyond the Arcane soul-metamorphoses). Such things are subtle but they need to be considered. For example, VT writes:
VT wrote:One ought not to occupy oneself with evil, other than in keeping a certain
distance and a certain reserve, if one wishes to avoid the risk of paralysing the
creative élan and a still greater risk—that of furnishing arms to the powers of
evil. One can grasp profoundly, i.e. intuitively, only that which one loves.
Love is the vital element of profound knowledge, intuitive knowledge. Now,
one cannot love evil. Evil is therefore unknowable in its essence. One can
understand it only at a distance, as an observer of its phenomenology.
On one hand, cautioning about preoccupying oneself with evil is completely valid. This is the same disease as those who can’t stop feeding on conspiracy theories. Yet, if we believe that evil can only be studied from a distance (as an observer of its phenomenology), we’ll never suspect that this evil is inseparably intermingled in our very spiritual blood. And it is true that we know only that which we love. It stands to reason that we should not love evil for its manifestations. However, even evil has Divine origins in the Tree of Life. Thus, we can know the Divine concealed in it. So it is clear – if we want to know evil only from a distance (by recognizing its external effects), we implicitly bar our way to true Michaelic self-knowledge, because to gain the latter, we must pass through the pinhole and have our inner being decomposed. Then our soul becomes the stage of a Cosmic Drama where macrocosmic spiritual beings push and pull the first-person flow of becoming in certain directions, while we are only a fine point of balance that leans and gives greater way to one or another.
So, even if we put aside the concrete question of VT for a moment, everything above can still be considered and internalized. It is not difficult to see that it does apply to most of what has become Western occultism. From biographic notes, we can see that VT started his spiritual journey in Hermeticism before he encountered Steiner. But we can also see how the Hermetic thread remained running parallel through his life and ultimately became dominant once again. As such, we can appreciate the masterful teaching of the Arcane asanas. We can literally learn to swim in the astral waters free from the body by absorbing this Hermetic Wisdom. Yet, it still seems that he couldn’t reach a tipping point. The Christ remains veiled in the mysterious core asymptotically approached in the Arcane soul-asanas. One may say, “Well, where VT stops, the Michaelic consciousness of the multiplicity in the higher spiritual world (Devachan), beings.” Yet, the trouble is that without knowing about this upper cone from another source, we’re unlikely to ever overcome the sense of existence implied in the lower cone. Not only that, but even the idea of it will be found antipathetic, as one would hardly be able to overcome the sense that it drags him back down into manifoldness.
We should feel that since the event of 1879, the way Steiner could speak of the spiritual realities is different than anything that could be found in the past traditions. Yes, surely one can always strike it out as mere metaphysical speculations or, at best, multiply refracted etheric visions, but if we are willing to follow, it is clear that such communications proceed from actual living together with the streams of beings. All traditions have spoken about such beings, but through the Michaelic impulse, we attain to a supersensible stance that allows us to live as a conscious spirit within the multiplicity of spirits. For example, take something like “The Spirits of Wisdom poured from themselves the etheric body of man.” For a person in ordinary consciousness, this is simply a fantastic image. One doesn’t even know what to do with it. We do not perceive Spirits of Wisdom, nor an etheric body, let alone one pouring into the other. For the Hermeticist, things could be more substantial. They can accept this as a valid etheric vision, but ultimately, they would say, “Yeah, but you are forgetting about Oneness – that is, the fundamental life of the Soul within the Arcane asanas. What you say may be correct, but it ultimately concerns the manifoldness of the created Cosmos, not the tracing back to the original Divine.” Only when we seek to align our first-person experiences with those of the multiplicity of higher spirits can we find the true origin of the images, which reflect
direct experiences.
Finally, I think it becomes much more comprehensible why one could feel an appeal in the Church mothership. We should simply get in the shoes of a Hermetic initiate who asymptotically seeks the Christ experience within the mysterious core. All the details of spiritual science are certainly interesting, but they feel as breaking down the Arcane into manifoldness. As such, the Church feels like an ally, because it preserves the mystical attitude toward the Divine.
I want to emphasize that none of this is written with ill feelings toward VT. From what I can feel about his soul, he has been completely
sincere and idealistic in everything he did. I only see it that he could not reach the tipping point from the Hermetic tradition to the new influx of Michaelic Inspiration. He absorbed as much as he could from spiritual science, but in the end, it felt fragmentary compared to the alive and warm unity of the Arcane asanas in soul space encircling the central mystery. In that way, he could not reach actual consciousness of the Devachan, where we can only know ourselves as a spirit embedded in the superimposed flow of multiplicity of spirits. As such, at the upper edge of the Imaginative world, he could only anticipate the Logos in mystical fervor.
PS: One may object that VT has spoken about Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. And this is true. In fact, I find his explanation of Inspiration as “thinking together” very apt. The fact, however, is that these modes of cognition can be understood even in our ordinary consciousness, because as we know, there’s always something of them present at any point of existence. It is a whole other thing when this Inspiration reaches such magnitude that we experience how the hierarchies
think our flow of becoming at different scales. I think it is easy to agree that such kinds of experiences and their descriptions can hardly be found in VT’s work. There are plenty of references to the members of the hierarchies, but they still sound in the more traditional Christian way, as entities, much like John had to still depict the beings of the Apocalypse.
