Tomberg and Anthroposophy

[Federica]

Let'e recall how VT speaks about dogma:

Hermetic philosophy, being the summary and synthesis of mysticism, gnosis and sacred magic, is not a philosophy among other philosophies, or a particular philosophical system amongst other particular philosophical systems. Just as the Catholic Church, being catholic or universal, cannot consider itself as a particular church among other particular churches, nor consider its dogmas as religious opinions among other religious opinions or confessions, so Hermetic philosophy, being the synthesis of all that which is essential in the spiritual life of humanity, cannot consider itself as a philosophy amongst many others. Presumption? It would be, without any doubt, a monstrous presumption if it were a matter of human invention instead of revelation from above. In fact, if you have a truth revealed from above, if the acceptance of this truth brings miracles of healing, peace and vivification with it, and if, lastly, it explains to you a thousand unexplained things—that are inexplicable without it—can you then consider it as an opinion among other opinions? Dogmatism? Yes, if one understands by “dogma” the certainty due to revelations of divine worth which prove fruitful and constructive, and due to the confirmation that they receive from reason and experience together. When one has certainty based on the concordance of divine revelation, divine human operation, and human understanding, how can one act as if one did not have it?

I'm not sure what this quote means to you, but I imagine it can only be highly misunderstood given your recent comments. It is actually a beautiful characterization of spiritual science, and how higher cognitive development should lift us above the intellectual machinations of endless discursive debates.

According to the RCC, dogma is revelation from Scriptures, interpreted and augmented by the institutional hierarchy of the RCC, which the faithful are required to accept and believe in unconditionally. In the quote above, VT tells us about the superiority of such dogmas: they are not only revealed truths, he says, but also confirmed by human reason.

This is precisely the mode of consciousness that Cleric has indicated as the greatest obstacle on the human evolutionary path. This is precisely the retrograde consciousness which the RCC and VT aspire to make perennial, putting the evolution of humanity at colossal risk of failure.

There is absolutely nothing beautiful in such a posture, and even less, spiritual-scientific! Let’s recall that VT tells us that the proper spiritual adept “does not have the somewhat puerile pretension of elevating oneself above the fruits of the admirable efforts of workers in science”. This reveals the most anti-spiritual-scientific views (as he explicitely admitted) at a time when it’s imperative that religious pursuits are freed from dogma and reunited with scientific and artistic endeavors.

The Time requires that we bring religious feelings into science, scientific thinking into religion, and artistic aliveness into both, to save them from dogmatism.

Now VT tells us that the RCC dogma is the most fruitful and constructive thing, whereas it's puerile to imagine that the Spirit can work within science and within art, and you call his a beautiful characteriztion of spiritual science? After all the discussions we have had for years about Science and Spirit, and after all Cleric's posts and essays that continually fructify the one by means of the other? This is sheer nonsense, Ashvin. I wish you to soon recover from your Catholic-project-Hermetic-retreat enchantment.

[AshvinP]

Let'e recall how VT speaks about dogma:

I'm not sure what this quote means to you, but I imagine it can only be highly misunderstood given your recent comments. It is actually a beautiful characterization of spiritual science, and how higher cognitive development should lift us above the intellectual machinations of endless discursive debates.

According to the RCC, dogma is revelation from Scriptures, interpreted and augmented by the institutional hierarchy of the RCC, which the faithful are required to accept and believe in unconditionally. In the quote above, VT tells us about the superiority of such dogmas: they are not only revealed truths, he says, but also confirmed by human reason.

This is precisely the mode of consciousness that Cleric has indicated as the greatest obstacle on the human evolutionary path. This is precisely the retrograde consciousness which the RCC and VT aspire to make perennial, putting the evolution of humanity at colossal risk of failure.

There is absolutely nothing beautiful in such a posture, and even less, spiritual-scientific! Let’s recall that VT tells us that the proper spiritual adept “does not have the somewhat puerile pretension of elevating oneself above the fruits of the admirable efforts of workers in science”. This reveals the most anti-spiritual-scientific views (as he explicitely admitted) at a time when it’s imperative that religious pursuits are freed from dogma and reunited with scientific and artistic endeavors.

The Time requires that we bring religious feelings into science, scientific thinking into religion, and artistic aliveness into both, to save them from dogmatism.

Now VT tells us that the RCC dogma is the most fruitful and constructive thing, whereas it's puerile to imagine that the Spirit can work within science and within art, and you call his a beautiful characteriztion of spiritual science? After all the discussions we have had for years about Science and Spirit, and after all Cleric's posts and essays that continually fructify the one by means of the other? This is sheer nonsense, Ashvin. I wish you to soon recover from your Catholic-project-Hermetic-retreat enchantment.

I don't know what else can be said here. I would say that I hope Cleric is paying attention to what can happen when things are too broadly and loosely characterized, but to be fair, I'm not sure how much that would even be in his control. For example, you described MoT as "astral CGOL", after he tried to make clear:

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’... 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.

So you do with Cleric the same thing you do with Steiner, VT, and everyone else - selectively ignore those parts which don't fit with your aggressive and borderline fanatic narrative about 'spiritual science', and selectively lift those parts which seem to fit. Your reach for the lowest hanging fruit of understanding and latch onto it. I invite you to revisit KHW and work on the cognitive-moral foundations (also cultivated by MoT), without which there is no higher development or science of the spirit. I don't think it's a coincidence that you are repelled by VT's work, since it centers around the purifying soul work that is necessary to encounter the Guardian in the proper way. Otherwise, you will continue misunderstanding and misrepresenting all the revelations that the spiritual worlds bring your way, yet remain none the wiser.

[Federica]

I don't know what else can be said here. I would say that I hope Cleric is paying attention to what can happen when things are too broadly and loosely characterized, but to be fair, I'm not sure how much that would even be in his control. For example, you described MoT as "astral CGOL", after he tried to make clear:

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’... 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.

So you do with Cleric the same thing you do with Steiner, VT, and everyone else - selectively ignore those parts which don't fit with your aggressive and borderline fanatic narrative about 'spiritual science', and selectively lift those parts which seem to fit. Your reach for the lowest hanging fruit of understanding and latch onto it. I invite you to revisit KHW and work on the cognitive-moral foundations (also cultivated by MoT), without which there is no higher development or science of the spirit. I don't think it's a coincidence that you are repelled by VT's work, since it centers around the purifying soul work that is necessary to encounter the Guardian in the proper way. Otherwise, you will continue misunderstanding and misrepresenting all the revelations that the spiritual worlds bring your way, yet remain none the wiser.

How lifeless...

- Firstly, you fail to reply on the retrograde split between science, art and religion, strongly advocated by VT.

- Secondly, you say I am selectively ignoring Cleric's posts, whereas in the very passage you quote, you have edited away the uncomfotable parts. Read the uncensored passage here, and you (or others perhaps) will see why I called "astral CGOL" the mode of consciousness expressed in the Arcana. The blue are the sentences you have patched together.

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.

Do you see the astral CGOL now?


PS: I am surely not repelled by Tomberg's work. As you may have selectively ignored, I wrote in this thread that I hold him in high regard. I have actually just bought MoT in printed version, and the Marseille Tarot card deck. As I already said, that he was wrong about spiritual science and advocated for a retrograde attitude towards the Church, doesn't mean his work is repelling and not a valuable source of exercises. It's only your biased look that makes you phantasize what my feelings may be (as usual).

[AshvinP]

- Firstly, you fail to reply on the retrograde split between science, art and religion, strongly advocated by VT.

Of course, VT is continually emphasizing how science, art, and religion should be restored to harmonious Unity through higher development, which he refers to as their communal soul.

- Secondly, you say I am selectively ignoring Cleric's posts, whereas in the very passage you quote, you have edited away the uncomfotable parts. Read the uncensored passage here, and you (or others perhaps) will see why I called "astral CGOL" the mode of consciousness expressed in the Arcana. The blue are the sentences you have patched together.

...
Do you see the astral CGOL now?

Actually, it may be helpful to elaborate on this, because it may not be clear from Cleric's post. As we know, every night we are in astral space when weaving through dream images. We are instinctively moving through the soul asanas, which are anchored in the dream scenes and narrative. When we are immersed in this dream narrative, of course, we aren't aware of any of that; the soul asanas are simply our unquestionable reality. (There is also some carryover formatting from normal intellectual experience, so it's not quite the imaginative depth). Some people also train to become lucid in this space, i.e., lucid dreaming or astral projection. They are now aware of their personality within the dreamscape, its basic relationship to the waking spectrum, and can will in certain directions to correspondingly shape the space. Yet, to understand from where this whole space issues, how it stands specifically in relation to higher and lower spaces, how the dream images relate to the soul and spiritual depths, and so on, they can only utilize ordinary intellectual gestures, conditioned by personal interests and knowledge, to patch explanations together. One could say they are investigating how inner intents bend the soul flow, how they are resisted or assisted, but this investigation is circumscribed within a narrow sphere of their previously accumulated personal understanding of what reality is and what it can be. Astral projection (the intellect is projected into astral space) of this sort can be appropriately characterized as "astral CGOL". The meaning of the soul asanas is siphoned through the fixed rule system of the intellect and iterated into various patterns.

This is not what Cleric described with respect to VT-MOT, or at least it shouldn't be. Here, we are dealing with a different mode of cognition within astral space. We are dealing with expanded degrees of imaginative freedom to explore the intuitive meaning of the soul asanas. We begin to think through the soul asanas in their native element, not with our intellectual gestures. We feel, in lucid clarity, how our living soul stances relate to one another and fit into the wider evolutionary picture. The lucid meaning at the horizon of our conscious state is clothed in the higher-order language of soul transformations. These living cognitive experiences are truly novel revelations (not rooted in prior personal understanding) and can then be precipitated in various symbolic illustrations, concepts, and lines of reasoning at the intellectual scale. Only from this higher perspective do we begin to understand how the imaginative movements embedded within symbols like dogma and cultic rituals relate to the depth axis of our soul being, how they attune us with deeper curvatures of soul destiny. This is what VT is pointing toward when exploring these topics. He is not trying to preserve some flattened intellectual axioms about spiritual reality that can be memorized, repeated, and iterated into patterns like CGOL.

Cleric compares it to an axiomatic basis of formal mathematics only to provide a sense of the firm support that is still present with Imaginative cognition, even though we are by no means weaving within the fixed rules, the frozen intuitions, of the mathematical landscape. We are instead weaving within a living, metamorphosing landscape that we would never imagine can or should be quantified. The concern is that, without renouncing this firm support and opening to Inspired cognition, the intellectual soul begins to feel like it is the final frontier of higher development, and the Source of this higher-order language can only be traced into a nebulous Unity through mystical contemplation of the Logos, rather than to autonomous centers of agency within the 'Platonic space'. Of course, he can correct me if I am misinterpreting, but that was my understanding. It was also my understanding that none of this is completely settled; it's just how the contents feel to Cleric when he meditates on them, and that certainly carries a good deal of weight. It's something to loosely integrate into our general intuitive orientation to what's going on, not to adopt as some unshakeable conclusion about the way things are and must always be.

I am still also contemplating the image of the initiate renouncing Devachan to sacrificially focus efforts within the sole institution and field of operations capable of forestalling complete moral degeneration of the soul in the near-term, serving the hospital triage function that Rodriel emphasized a few times. I saw a movie recently about the possibility of nuclear holocaust, "A House Full of Dynamite" (it's interesting to me how it was released right in the middle of this discussion). Chicago is about to be hit with an ICBM, and the question is whether and how to retaliate. A fighter pilot is sent out to execute the potential order to drop a nuclear weapon on Russia, China, or whoever. At that moment, I was thinking that I would want a devout Catholic soul in the cockpit, because such a soul stands the highest chance of saying, "Sorry, POTUS, but I refuse to obey this order - I value the universal dignity of human life more than 'defending the homeland' and getting revenge".  I hope no one takes that as some rigid doctrine - "only Catholic souls can save the world from nuclear holocaust". There is no discursive argumentation here. It is meant as a symbolic image to help us better feel our way into the kinds of impulses animating a soul like VT toward his sacrificial work, even (and especially) if we are unsure about those impulses and therefore desire to explore them further. 

PS: I am surely not repelled by Tomberg's work. As you may have selectively ignored, I wrote in this thread that I hold him in high regard. I have actually just bought MoT in printed version, and the Marseille Tarot card deck. As I already said, that he was wrong about spiritual science and advocated for a retrograde attitude towards the Church, doesn't mean his work is repelling and not a valuable source of exercises. It's only your biased look that makes you phantasize what my feelings may be (as usual).

So, he became guided by retrograde forces and desired to re-enslave the intellectual soul to flattened Church dogma, negating the endeavor of spiritual science, but also provided a valuable source of exercises for developing the free human spirit? I'm sorry, but that makes zero sense. And this is why I mentioned a few times that the former can only be something we are adding out of ourselves to the given content, which seems to be universally recognized by seekers (including Anthroposophists) as a profound resource for spiritual striving in keeping with the demands of our age.

[Federica]

PS: I am surely not repelled by Tomberg's work. As you may have selectively ignored, I wrote in this thread that I hold him in high regard. I have actually just bought MoT in printed version, and the Marseille Tarot card deck. As I already said, that he was wrong about spiritual science and advocated for a retrograde attitude towards the Church, doesn't mean his work is repelling and not a valuable source of exercises. It's only your biased look that makes you phantasize what my feelings may be (as usual).

So, he became guided by retrograde forces and desired to re-enslave the intellectual soul to flattened Church dogma, negating the endeavor of spiritual science, but also provided a valuable source of exercises for developing the free human spirit? I'm sorry, but that makes zero sense. And this is why I mentioned a few times that the former can only be something we are adding out of ourselves to the given content, which seems to be universally recognized by seekers (including Anthroposophists) as a profound resource for spiritual striving in keeping with the demands of our age.

I'll clarify that first. I am satisfied with how Cleric has characterized the limits of Tomberg’s cognitive outreach. These characterizations (see below) clearly and fully address your question: how one can simultaneously consider that Tomberg’s explorations of the astral world are authentic and helpfully presented in MoT, and that he could not reach consciousness of the spiritual worlds proper, which led him to key mistaken conceptions, about Spiritual Science and the RCC.

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.

The following quote exists in Prokofiev's book "'The impulse of the consciousness soul has failed' said Tomberg to Lubensky in Holland at the beginning of the nineteen forties, 'a direct path must be found from the intellectual soul to the we-soul (Spirit Self)'." I don't know if this is authentic, but if it is true, then this would immediately explain almost everything. It would certainly explain:

However, the inner descendent of this same person today believes that there is no spiritual science and never can be. Because even a spiritual science based on its central focus can only add to the mill of death. It will unavoidably become intellectualised and ‘fossilised’.

Now, such statements can proceed from the conviction that something in the evolutionary dynamics has irrevocably shifted, and the SS approach can never be successful, thus 'a direct path must be found from the intellectual soul to the we-soul (Spirit Self).' This would also explain:

[it] doesn’t mean that there isn’t and never was knowledge of the spirit. But knowledge of the spirit is not science but inner certainty – that means it is a condition that cannot be imposed on someone else. In any case it has to forego any claim to universal validity and scrutiny. It is based on the most personal inner experience and can possibly only be shared with very close companions who have been joined through destiny.

This basically splits human knowledge into the practical sphere and the sphere of mystical revelation, which is a matter of personal experience that shouldn't be talked about much (does this remind us of Eugene, who says that his meditative experiences are too intimate to share?). In other words, we should clearly feel that the tension between the inner, the intimate, the spiritual, and the outer, the conceptual, which is brought into contact with the mystical, will unavoidably sclerotize it. Thus, the failed spiritual soul, where the Imaginative thinking gradient would have to exist, must instead remain as a kind of buffer zone that protects the sacred from the profane.

This would explain why the sacred has to remain enshrined in the body of the Church, as if to constantly remind us that there are two spheres of human experience that should not be allowed to diffuse into each other lightly. In this scenario, humanity's evolution should proceed in such a way that it has to endure the time until the Spirit-Self begins to take the upper hand, and the intellectual sphere is no longer a threat. Thus, the absolute necessity of the RCC, which plays the role of the we-soul until the right time comes (toward the end of the physical incarnations, I guess).

Now, this would certainly explain a lot. Yet, it rests on the assumption that what VT has said about the failed consciousness soul is authentic. Whether that is the case, I don't know. But whether it is, or not, I think it is clear that for VT, the deep religious life stood higher than whatever transformed thinking could reach. This would mean, that even though the deep immersion in SS throughout his life, he could experience with the mentioned inner certainty (and consequently, with the corresponding inner warmth) only the more general facts of the spiritual world, while other details he was working on through intuitive thinking. Yet, it is only logical that if this intuitive thinking doesn't lead to the same inner certainty and warmth that glues the facts together, it is inevitable that the soul would feel a certain dissatisfaction. What remains is to focus on the warm innerly certain element, even though it remains as a more diffuse truth. This is a real possibility: it could be that the whole anthroposophic period of VT was one of intense intuitive thinking, without, however, experiencing these thoughts as condensing from true clairvoyant experience in the higher spiritual worlds. This would again explain a lot. He simply got exhausted and in spite of all the years of intense intuitive thinking, he still felt that in this way he still stands outside the strata that can be known through deep religious union.

Let’s face it: at a certain point, VT must have thought: “There are things which Steiner couldn’t see in full or that were simply not yet possible to see in his time.” I hope we can grasp this with complete equanimity. I’m not suggesting that VT was prideful or something like that. As a matter of fact, we too have had the audacity to question here certain things said by Steiner, such as our talks about the motor and sensory neurons, except that we question more the technical details, and not the deeper intuitions which turn out to be immensely valuable. In VT’s case, however, we’re dealing with a major shift. There’s no doubt Steiner had a very clear and unchangeable view about the fact that the RCC (or any religious institution for that matter) would act to keep man back at the stage of the intellectual soul. VT, on the other hand, feels that not only this is not the case, but it is in fact the best rootstock in which the spiritual soul can be grafted.

As said in this last passage, it’s clear that Steiner and Tomberg held opposite positions regarding the RCC’s capacity to be a vessel for humanity’s next evolutionary steps. And although I think that Steiner was right and Tomberg was wrong, I consider VT explorations of the soul world instructive.


By the way, what reported so far should also substantiate the other question: Tomberg's view that Hermeticists/unknown friends should limit their purview to hermeticism/religion and refrain from interfering with science and art is problematic. As I have quoted multiple times by now, he said that Hermeticists "do not have the somewhat puerile pretension of elevating themselves above the holy faith of the faithful, or above the fruits of the admirable efforts of workers in science, or above the creations of artistic genius." He was obviously critical of what Steiner did with arts and sciences, systematically spreading his vision and its practical applications in every field of science and art. So how do you come to a statement such as this one? Where do you find that art, science and religion should be restored to unity according to VT? Who, or what impulse should restore them to unity, according to him?

Of course, VT is continually emphasizing how science, art, and religion should be restored to harmonious Unity through higher development, which he refers to as their communal soul.

[AshvinP]

When you only re-quote Cleric, I have no idea how you understand what is written. It is only when you add your additional comments to these characterizations, like those surrounding "lunar retrograde", "astral CGOL", the quotes about dogma, and so on, that we get a better sense of how things may not be understood or oriented properly. I see this thread about "Tomberg and Anthroposophy" as a way of continually improving that orientation, but if you see it as a way to reach a satisfying conclusion about who was right and who was wrong, that's fine. I have already said all that I can say about why I think that is generally detrimental to the whole spirit of spiritual science.

By the way, what reported so far should also substantiate the other question: Tomberg's view that Hermeticists/unknown friends should limit their purview to hermeticism/religion and refrain from interfering with science and art is problematic. As I have quoted multiple times by now, he said that Hermeticists "do not have the somewhat puerile pretension of elevating themselves above the holy faith of the faithful, or above the fruits of the admirable efforts of workers in science, or above the creations of artistic genius." He was obviously critical of what Steiner did with arts and sciences, systematically spreading his vision and its practical applications in every field of science and art. So how do you come to a statement such as this one? Where do you find that art, science and religion should be restored to unity according to VT? Who, or what impulse should restore them to unity, according to him?

Of course, VT is continually emphasizing how science, art, and religion should be restored to harmonious Unity through higher development, which he refers to as their communal soul.

The modern Hermetic impulse should serve that restoration. We quoted this before:

"And inspired by the example of John the Beloved Disciple, they do not pretend, and never will pretend, to play a directing role in religion, science, art, and social or political life; but they are constantly attentive so as not to miss any occasion to serve religion, philosophy, science, art, the social and political life of humanity, and to this infuse the breath of life of their communal soul - analogous to the administration of the sacrament of Holy Communion."

This is the red thread running through the whole series of meditations, whose aim is to bring these aspects of human endeavor into a living unity within our imaginative life (science), feeling (art), and volition (religion), so that we may act as conduits (as unknown friends) that infuse the breath of Life into them on every available occasion.

[Federica]

When you only re-quote Cleric, I have no idea how you understand what is written. It is only when you add your additional comments to these characterizations, like those surrounding "lunar retrograde", "astral CGOL", the quotes about dogma, and so on, that we get a better sense of how things may not be understood or oriented properly. I see this thread about "Tomberg and Anthroposophy" as a way of continually improving that orientation, but if you see it as a way to reach a satisfying conclusion about who was right and who was wrong, that's fine. I have already said all that I can say about why I think that is generally detrimental to the whole spirit of spiritual science.

By the way, what reported so far should also substantiate the other question: Tomberg's view that Hermeticists/unknown friends should limit their purview to hermeticism/religion and refrain from interfering with science and art is problematic. As I have quoted multiple times by now, he said that Hermeticists "do not have the somewhat puerile pretension of elevating themselves above the holy faith of the faithful, or above the fruits of the admirable efforts of workers in science, or above the creations of artistic genius." He was obviously critical of what Steiner did with arts and sciences, systematically spreading his vision and its practical applications in every field of science and art. So how do you come to a statement such as this one? Where do you find that art, science and religion should be restored to unity according to VT? Who, or what impulse should restore them to unity, according to him?

Of course, VT is continually emphasizing how science, art, and religion should be restored to harmonious Unity through higher development, which he refers to as their communal soul.

The modern Hermetic impulse should serve that restoration. We quoted this before:

"And inspired by the example of John the Beloved Disciple, they do not pretend, and never will pretend, to play a directing role in religion, science, art, and social or political life; but they are constantly attentive so as not to miss any occasion to serve religion, philosophy, science, art, the social and political life of humanity, and to this infuse the breath of life of their communal soul - analogous to the administration of the sacrament of Holy Communion."

This is the red thread running through the whole series of meditations, whose aim is to bring these aspects of human endeavor into a living unity within our imaginative life (science), feeling (art), and volition (religion), so that we may act as conduits (as unknown friends) that infuse the breath of Life into them on every available occasion.

Cleric has not spoken in half-words, not in any of the passages I've reported. If you are not able or willing to take them in for what they express, because they displease you, or for any other reason, I get it. But I am not going to paraphrase them.

Moreover, your whole usual attitude of superiority, being on the lookout to "help" my poor lower soul find orientation, doesn't help these exchanges find any promising basis and I am way less excited that I could be about discussing these things in these conditions (as I guess everyone else also is).

So I will limit it to only one followup question: How is the modern Hermetic impulse supposed to restore the unity of science, art and religion, according to VT? What does it concretely mean to "serve" art and science, for the modern Hermetic? What are some examples he gives? I am not looking for declarations of principles, but for practical examples of serving science and art. This must include worldly endeavors, of course. If it's only a matter of saying one's vague admiration for the wonderful advances brought about by science workers, that’s not in any way a contribution to restoring any unity, in the way that is urgently needed to elevate human consciousness toward the next epoch.

[AshvinP]

So I will limit it to only one followup question: How is the modern Hermetic impulse supposed to restore the unity of science, art and religion, according to VT? What does it concretely mean to "serve" art and science, for the modern Hermetic? What are some examples he gives? I am not looking for declarations of principles, but for practical examples of serving science and art. This must include worldly endeavors, of course. If it's only a matter of saying one's vague admiration for the wonderful advances brought about by science workers, that’s not in any way a contribution to restoring any unity, in the way that is urgently needed to elevate human consciousness toward the next epoch.

The concrete examples he gives are his entire life and works. MoT is a service of religion and, by proxy, science and art (it's interesting to consider the intimate connection between the Catholic faith and modern science, how the latter was fostered through the institutions of the former). As discussed before, VT brought a transformative impulse into the domain of religion just as Steiner did for science (and began to do with religion through CC).

Also, let's remember it was Cleric and you who were emphasizing before:

You yourself are already part of “the other option”, the non institutional one, when you for example decide to post a phenomenological essay on publicly accessible platforms, and/or to share it with the world in meditation. Is this “waiting passively” for Lucifer? No, right? Wouldn’t that be a good example of "spontaneous manifestation"?

Or as Cleric put it, we don't need to always trace the higher Life through wires to tangible entities. Likewise, we don't need to judge VT's service in the religious or scientific domains by how many organizations or programs he set up, or anything like that. He was/is a core participant in the 'other option', which has been described as the 'subtle and silent' work that invites souls to freely transform and infuse the higher Life into wherever they may find themselves, whether on a forum like this one, the Church, a corporation, a parliament, a laboratory, etc.

[Federica]

So I will limit it to only one followup question: How is the modern Hermetic impulse supposed to restore the unity of science, art and religion, according to VT? What does it concretely mean to "serve" art and science, for the modern Hermetic? What are some examples he gives? I am not looking for declarations of principles, but for practical examples of serving science and art. This must include worldly endeavors, of course. If it's only a matter of saying one's vague admiration for the wonderful advances brought about by science workers, that’s not in any way a contribution to restoring any unity, in the way that is urgently needed to elevate human consciousness toward the next epoch.

The concrete examples he gives are his entire life and works. MoT is a service of religion and, by proxy, science and art (it's interesting to consider the intimate connection between the Catholic faith and modern science, how the latter was fostered through the institutions of the former). As discussed before, VT brought a transformative impulse into the domain of religion just as Steiner did for science (and began to do with religion through CC).

Also, let's remember it was Cleric and you who were emphasizing before:

You yourself are already part of “the other option”, the non institutional one, when you for example decide to post a phenomenological essay on publicly accessible platforms, and/or to share it with the world in meditation. Is this “waiting passively” for Lucifer? No, right? Wouldn’t that be a good example of "spontaneous manifestation"?

Or as Cleric put it, we don't need to always trace the higher Life through wires to tangible entities. Likewise, we don't need to judge VT's service in the religious or scientific domains by how many organizations or programs he set up, or anything like that. He was/is a core participant in the 'other option', which has been described as the 'subtle and silent' work that invites souls to freely transform and infuse the higher Life into wherever they may find themselves, whether on a forum like this one, the Church, a corporation, a parliament, a laboratory, etc.

Yeah ok, got it. It's your refined spiritual technique of loosely integrating things in your general orientation that allows you to consider any question, and be able to support one given viewpoint on the question just as well as its opposite, as you see fit. It's quite convenient. That's how the split between religion, art and science in Tomberg's conception magically transforms into its opposite - a spiritual-scientific impulse - in your orientation (against Tomberg's direct admission of plain dismissal of spiritual science at various occasions, let's recall...)

For my part, I agree with this other view, and think that the split (or the duality, as I called if before) is what makes Tomberg's soul impulse work against the necessary reunion of artistic, scientific, and religious impulses, in an avoidant - but for all intents and purposes retrograde - form.

This basically splits human knowledge into the practical sphere and the sphere of mystical revelation, which is a matter of personal experience that shouldn't be talked about much (does this remind us of Eugene, who says that his meditative experiences are too intimate to share?). In other words, we should clearly feel that the tension between the inner, the intimate, the spiritual, and the outer, the conceptual, which is brought into contact with the mystical, will unavoidably sclerotize it. Thus, the failed spiritual soul, where the Imaginative thinking gradient would have to exist, must instead remain as a kind of buffer zone that protects the sacred from the profane.

[Federica]

Do you see the astral CGOL now?

Actually, it may be helpful to elaborate on this, because it may not be clear from Cleric's post. As we know, every night we are in astral space when weaving through dream images. We are instinctively moving through the soul asanas, which are anchored in the dream scenes and narrative. When we are immersed in this dream narrative, of course, we aren't aware of any of that; the soul asanas are simply our unquestionable reality. (There is also some carryover formatting from normal intellectual experience, so it's not quite the imaginative depth). Some people also train to become lucid in this space, i.e., lucid dreaming or astral projection. They are now aware of their personality within the dreamscape, its basic relationship to the waking spectrum, and can will in certain directions to correspondingly shape the space. Yet, to understand from where this whole space issues, how it stands specifically in relation to higher and lower spaces, how the dream images relate to the soul and spiritual depths, and so on, they can only utilize ordinary intellectual gestures, conditioned by personal interests and knowledge, to patch explanations together. One could say they are investigating how inner intents bend the soul flow, how they are resisted or assisted, but this investigation is circumscribed within a narrow sphere of their previously accumulated personal understanding of what reality is and what it can be. Astral projection (the intellect is projected into astral space) of this sort can be appropriately characterized as "astral CGOL". The meaning of the soul asanas is siphoned through the fixed rule system of the intellect and iterated into various patterns.

This is not what Cleric described with respect to VT-MOT, or at least it shouldn't be. Here, we are dealing with a different mode of cognition within astral space. We are dealing with expanded degrees of imaginative freedom to explore the intuitive meaning of the soul asanas. We begin to think through the soul asanas in their native element, not with our intellectual gestures. We feel, in lucid clarity, how our living soul stances relate to one another and fit into the wider evolutionary picture. The lucid meaning at the horizon of our conscious state is clothed in the higher-order language of soul transformations. These living cognitive experiences are truly novel revelations (not rooted in prior personal understanding) and can then be precipitated in various symbolic illustrations, concepts, and lines of reasoning at the intellectual scale. Only from this higher perspective do we begin to understand how the imaginative movements embedded within symbols like dogma and cultic rituals relate to the depth axis of our soul being, how they attune us with deeper curvatures of soul destiny. This is what VT is pointing toward when exploring these topics. He is not trying to preserve some flattened intellectual axioms about spiritual reality that can be memorized, repeated, and iterated into patterns like CGOL.

Cleric compares it to an axiomatic basis of formal mathematics only to provide a sense of the firm support that is still present with Imaginative cognition, even though we are by no means weaving within the fixed rules, the frozen intuitions, of the mathematical landscape. We are instead weaving within a living, metamorphosing landscape that we would never imagine can or should be quantified. The concern is that, without renouncing this firm support and opening to Inspired cognition, the intellectual soul begins to feel like it is the final frontier of higher development, and the Source of this higher-order language can only be traced into a nebulous Unity through mystical contemplation of the Logos, rather than to autonomous centers of agency within the 'Platonic space'. Of course, he can correct me if I am misinterpreting, but that was my understanding. It was also my understanding that none of this is completely settled; it's just how the contents feel to Cleric when he meditates on them, and that certainly carries a good deal of weight. It's something to loosely integrate into our general intuitive orientation to what's going on, not to adopt as some unshakeable conclusion about the way things are and must always be.

Yes, I agree that Cleric didn’t mean that MoT was written out of a series of 22 lucid dreams I think you have paraphrased him correctly. But the key point is that the way “our living soul stances relate to one another and fit into the wider evolutionary picture” is strictly lawful, not free. The arcana configurations are given configurations, and act as defined guides. In other words there’s no symphony. This circumscribed lawfulness is what I artistically described as CGOL. Then I agree that it’s not mere dwelling within the sphere of one’s own soul gestures repurposed as objective reality, as in lucid dreaming. This is why I called it not CGOL, but astral CGOL. I think it fits quite well this mode of cognition. Ultimately, it’s nothing other than saying “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”, though in an encapsulated form.

Regarding the way you suggest that I take Cleric's ideas, it's interesting how you have changed, now that you disagree with his overall understanding of the RCC question. It's only now that you recommend that I understand things as "just how Cleric feels when he meditates on these things". As long as you felt yourself fully aligned with his 'meditative feelings' your vocabulary was of a very different register, but now that those feelings are less orientating for you, they must also be less orientating for everyone else, and should be only "loosely integrated in a general intuitive orientation". Be careful not to get lost in a labyrinth of looseness, with all these loose-on-loose general integrations.