Tomberg and Anthroposophy

[AshvinP]

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.

[/quote]


All I can say is that I hope Cleric has attained a somewhat different perspective on the matter after subsequent discussion, as I'm sure Rodriel and I have from his posts. I also don't think he is so firmly planted in these ideas as you imagine him to be, because he is fundamentally engaged in a different sort of inquiry, one that serves as a beginning, an invitation to deeper contemplation of the inner dynamics, rather than an ending, a satisfying conclusion about VT's retrograde forces and what not. It's the same with all the cautions that I issued to Rodriel before. It's simply a different level of discussion, aimed at quite different things. This is why you see stark opposition in all the characterizations, and then think I am trying to force them into agreement. This is simply an artifact of the way you are approaching the topic in the first place. Steiner continually stressed how, when we are trying to approach and discuss true supersensible experience, we must become accustomed to these 'contradictions', because the flow of life itself is filled with such contradictions as we examine it from different angles. He pointed this out in Human and Cosmic Thought, for example, with respect to all the debates between nominalism v. realism, materialism v. idealism, etc. I imagine you will find all of this to be irrelevant, but if we think about it deeply enough, we will see how it applies in these Steiner-VT discussions as well.


https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA151/En ... 21p01.html

Within the scope of our objective experience there is a whole realm where Nominalism—the idea that the collective term is only a name—is fully justified. We have “one”, “two”, “three”, “four”, “five”, and so on, but it is impossible to find in the expression “number” anything that has a real existence. “Number” has no existence. “One”, “two”, “three”, “five”, “six”,—they exist. But what I said in the last lecture, that in order to find the general concept one must let that which corresponds to it pass over into movement—this cannot be done with the concept “Number”. One “one” does not pass over into “two”. It must always be taken as “one”. Not even in thought can we pass over into two, or from two into three. Only the individual numbers exist, not “number” in general. As applied to the nature of numbers, Nominalism is entirely correct; but when we come to the single animal in relation to its genus, Realism is entirely correct. For it is impossible for a deer to exist, and another deer, and yet another, without there being the genus “deer”. The figure “two” can exist for itself, “one”, “seven”, etc., can exist for themselves. But in so far as anything real appears in number, the number is a quality, and the concept “number” has no specific existence. External things are related to general concepts in two different ways: Nominalism is appropriate in one case, and Realism in the other.

[Federica]

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. 

I think it’s necessary to issue serious caution about this thought/feeling, even if it's 'only' an attempt to better sympathise with VT's sacrificial work, and especially if one uses it as orientation to satisfy a desire to explore such impulses.

We know well that a religious belief is not protected from being supplanted by any other belief system - belief systems are all on the same plane, by their intrinsic quality of not being rooted in direct cognitive experience, but - in the best cases - in warm faith, aspiration of the soul, or mystical impulse. The way we know this is from direct experience. We only need to think, for example, about how totalitarianism as a belief system has simply, radically, and abruptly supplanted a Catholic belief system in many people who have, from one day to the next, piloted those aircrafts indeed, and done all sorts of horrible similar things, in war situations for instance. This thought is just as valid as your cinematic "Sorry POTUS, but I refuse to obey this order". Let's face it, your thought - emerged BTW while watching a commercial movie whose goal is to induce a specific spectrum of feelings in the audience - is a fully arbitrary thought. It is wishful thinking, entirely shaped by one’s worldview and soul preferences.

[AshvinP]

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. 

I think it’s necessary to issue serious caution about this thought/feeling, even if it's 'only' an attempt to better sympathise with VT's sacrificial work, and especially if one uses it as orientation to satisfy a desire to explore such impulses.

We know well that a religious belief is not protected from being supplanted by any other belief system - belief systems are all on the same plane, by their intrinsic quality of not being rooted in direct cognitive experience, but - in the best cases - in warm faith, aspiration of the soul, or mystical impulse. The way we know this is from direct experience. We only need to think, for example, about how totalitarianism as a belief system has simply, radically, and abruptly supplanted a Catholic belief system in many people who have, from one day to the next, piloted those aircrafts indeed, and done all sorts of horrible similar things, in war situations for instance. This thought is just as valid as your cinematic "Sorry POTUS, but I refuse to obey this order". Let's face it, your thought - emerged BTW while watching a commercial movie whose goal is to induce a specific spectrum of feelings in the audience - is a fully arbitrary thought. It is wishful thinking, entirely shaped by one’s worldview and soul preferences.

The movie points to a real and imminent possibility (which we were discussing on this thread before the movie was even released), and a spiritual scientific inquiry loses all meaning if it is simply ignores such possibilities and how they shape the real-time evolutionary process. Rodriel and I shouldn't be the only ones contemplating these possibilities and the corresponding triage function of the Church in these rapidly degenerating circumstances. So many facts surrounding, not only VT, but the Anthroposophical endeavor as a whole, and its relative impotence in recent years, become sensible when we try to feel how the intellectual soul substance has degenerated, and the protective foundations of PoF-KHW-MoT, which Steiner intended for his trumpet blast, have gone AWOL. You only briefly responded to this point by pointing to a quite abstract principle that the intellectual soul morphology can never disappear. Such principles can be useful when trying to get a broad intellectual orientation to spiritual evolution, but they become a hindrance if we are resting on them to avoid a more precise spiritual scientific inquiry.

Everything Cleric illustrated so well before also applies here - "This is the intellectual soul in action, which needs to feel how everything can be traced through the representations, as we can trace wires... To be on the safe side, it would be better that everything manifesting in the worldly sphere should have its clearly traceable image in the wires that the senses and the intellect can grasp."


If we try to feel what we are doing when skirting past these nuanced explorations of real-time evolutionary conditions, and instead resting on abstract principles that can summarily dismiss such explorations, we will find its rooted in the intellect's desire for clear-cut categories and boxes that allow it to feel satisfied with its conclusions about what is right and wrong, good and evil, progressive and retrograde, and so on. The intellect loses trust in the Spirit's ability to patiently move through the circumstances on a case-by-case basis and draw down the corresponding moral intuitions. When you take my entire post on the differences between astral CGOL and Imaginative cognition, and instead of using that as a basis to get a more refined feeling for the impulses at play, focus on one single thought experiment and point out how a Catholic pilot may just as well do something horrible, it is a manifestation of distrust in the capacity to patiently explore the imagination and get a feel for what it is pointing to. You did exactly what I said I hoped you wouldn't do, which was to take it as some abstract doctrine about how Catholic souls, without cognitive development, are more likely to save the world. Yes, if that's what I was doing, the thought would be fully arbitrary, but it's not at all what I am doing in my exploration. Notice how your response does not invite any further exploration, rather it only states what is the case and invites me to agree or disagree. Of course, I agree that there are many examples of religious souls with strong beliefs being tempted and succumbing to lower impulses and correspondingly different beliefs, but how does this agreement illuminate the topic at issue?

The whole discussion would be much more productive if these points were engaged with in a living way, rather than brushed aside by all-encompassing thoughts. I have no problem whatsoever if these possibilities are wrestled with and, after such wrestling, thoughts emerge that still cast a negative light on the Catholic project. VT himself does that wrestling when evaluating other 20th-century spiritual approaches like, for example, Gurdjieff's 'inverse crystallization' of the astral body. Likewise, I am not trying to abstractly put every modern spiritual impulse on a plane of equivalence, but to patiently and carefully explore them on a case-by-case basis. The fact is that these ideas haven't been wrestled with on this thread, only brushed aside in the rush to form a satisfying and final conclusion, which allows the intellect to have a clearly traceable image that it can grasp when confronted by these explorations. And that is where spiritual science ends and dogmatic thinking begins. Spiritual scientists should be able to lead by example in these areas, not by what is formally stated on paper. Not coincidentally, the more we understand that by living it out in our imaginative explorations, the more we also understand VT's impulse and what he was up to, why he transitioned to a new domain of spiritual work, why he phrased ideas in certain ways, and so on.

[Federica]

The movie points to a real and imminent possibility (which we were discussing on this thread before the movie was even released), and a spiritual scientific inquiry loses all meaning if it is simply ignores such possibilities and how they shape the real-time evolutionary process. Rodriel and I shouldn't be the only ones contemplating these possibilities and the corresponding triage function of the Church in these rapidly degenerating circumstances. So many facts surrounding, not only VT, but the Anthroposophical endeavor as a whole, and its relative impotence in recent years, become sensible when we try to feel how the intellectual soul substance has degenerated, and the protective foundations of PoF-KHW-MoT, which Steiner intended for his trumpet blast, have gone AWOL. You only briefly responded to this point by pointing to a quite abstract principle that the intellectual soul morphology can never disappear. Such principles can be useful when trying to get a broad intellectual orientation to spiritual evolution, but they become a hindrance if we are resting on them to avoid a more precise spiritual scientific inquiry.

Everything Cleric illustrated so well before also applies here - "This is the intellectual soul in action, which needs to feel how everything can be traced through the representations, as we can trace wires... To be on the safe side, it would be better that everything manifesting in the worldly sphere should have its clearly traceable image in the wires that the senses and the intellect can grasp."


If we try to feel what we are doing when skirting past these nuanced explorations of real-time evolutionary conditions, and instead resting on abstract principles that can summarily dismiss such explorations, we will find its rooted in the intellect's desire for clear-cut categories and boxes that allow it to feel satisfied with its conclusions about what is right and wrong, good and evil, progressive and retrograde, and so on. The intellect loses trust in the Spirit's ability to patiently move through the circumstances on a case-by-case basis and draw down the corresponding moral intuitions. When you take my entire post on the differences between astral CGOL and Imaginative cognition, and instead of using that as a basis to get a more refined feeling for the impulses at play, focus on one single thought experiment and point out how a Catholic pilot may just as well do something horrible, it is a manifestation of distrust in the capacity to patiently explore the imagination and get a feel for what it is pointing to. You did exactly what I said I hoped you wouldn't do, which was to take it as some abstract doctrine about how Catholic souls, without cognitive development, are more likely to save the world. Yes, if that's what I was doing, the thought would be fully arbitrary, but it's not at all what I am doing in my exploration. Notice how your response does not invite any further exploration, rather it only states what is the case and invites me to agree or disagree. Of course, I agree that there are many examples of religious souls with strong beliefs being tempted and succumbing to lower impulses and correspondingly different beliefs, but how does this agreement illuminate the topic at issue?

The whole discussion would be much more productive if these points were engaged with in a living way, rather than brushed aside by all-encompassing thoughts. I have no problem whatsoever if these possibilities are wrestled with and, after such wrestling, thoughts emerge that still cast a negative light on the Catholic project. VT himself does that wrestling when evaluating other 20th-century spiritual approaches like, for example, Gurdjieff's 'inverse crystallization' of the astral body. Likewise, I am not trying to abstractly put every modern spiritual impulse on a plane of equivalence, but to patiently and carefully explore them on a case-by-case basis. The fact is that these ideas haven't been wrestled with on this thread, only brushed aside in the rush to form a satisfying and final conclusion, which allows the intellect to have a clearly traceable image that it can grasp when confronted by these explorations. And that is where spiritual science ends and dogmatic thinking begins. Spiritual scientists should be able to lead by example in these areas, not by what is formally stated on paper. Not coincidentally, the more we understand that by living it out in our imaginative explorations, the more we also understand VT's impulse and what he was up to, why he transitioned to a new domain of spiritual work, why he phrased ideas in certain ways, and so on.

Ashvin,

Where is the "precision" and the "spiritual-scientific inquiry" in the emotionally triggered thought of a Catholic soul saying "Sorry POTUS, but I refuse to obey this order"? BTW you will notice, my point was not that a Catholic can do horrors, but that such observation (that a Catholic can do it) is an example of an alternative thought standing exactly at the same level as your own, which therefore stands out as wishful thinking, originating from personally preferred soul environments. My point was also that a belief system, like the Catholic faith and many others, is precisely what we need to overcome today, and doesn't guarantee an above-average moral response, at all. So, among the many reactive thoughts that the movie could trigger, yours is on the same exact plane as many others, and has no particular foundation other than personal wish and preference. That was my point.

When you take my entire post on the differences between astral CGOL and Imaginative cognition, and instead of using that as a basis to get a more refined feeling for the impulses at play, focus on one single thought experiment...

I replied to that entire post in 3 separate parts, one for each paragraph of your post. Could it be that - in what has now become a regular occurrence, last time five days ago when you missed R's post quoted by Anthony - posts keep passing through unnoticed by you? Could it be that something has become too loose on your side? This is the one you might have missed.

[AshvinP]

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.

I did miss this post, thanks for pointing attention back to it. It's simply that, when many responses come up in quick succession within a short timeframe, it's easy to miss one or two.

I am not sure whether Imaginative cognition, through which we 'metamorphose through the axiomatic arcanic patterns', is being understood correctly. When Steiner describes the experience of Imaginative cognition, do you also feel it is 'strictly lawful, not free' and could therefore be described as a kind of CGOL (which, to me, describes inner gestures which are mechanical and rooted in fixed rules)?

Of course, all these spectrums of experience are relative, so Imaginative cognition could be described as relatively unfree when operating 'in isolation' from the Inspired state, since it still relies on firm imaginative support that anchors the meaningful transformations. Yet it could also be described as relatively freer than the intellectual state, since the imaginative support is more holistic and integrates wider degrees of inner freedom to explore the meaningful transformations. Since the Imaginative mode of cognition (in the Steiner-VT sense) is only reached through a certain level of purification of the soul life, the selfish factors which normally constrict our capacity to understand and relate the images at our conscious horizon are greatly loosened. We begin to experience the meaning of the images from the perspective of the beings who think them, although as said, this harmony of perspectives is still more constrained than the Inspired state.

It is also simply not the case that the arcanic transformations are definitive guides for VT, as if he imagines the astral space can only be explored through those particular soul asanas. That is why the Tarot is only one branch of Christian Hermeticism, and the astral space can also be explored through the symbolic gestures of Kabbalah, alchemy, medieval philosophical systems, religious ideas, and so on. These could also be said to act as axiomatic bases for the exploration, but it is precisely the capacity to switch between such bases as needed that indicates a relatively free and flexible form of Imaginative cognition. They are all characterized by VT as branches extending from the trunk of Imaginative (magic), Inspired (gnosis), and Intuitive (mysticism) cognition, which transcends all of their particular bases.

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.

I don't disagree with his overall understanding of the RCC question, as he imagines that question, but I disagree to some extent that what he imagines is also what VT-Rodriel imagines, and I think the difference between what he imagines and what they imagine resides precisely in the more specified details of the current evolutionary circumstances that have mostly been brushed aside.

I am only using similar language to what Cleric himself used to describe his meditative feelings and ideas in this domain, to counter what seems to be a persistent stance on this thread that everything is a definitively settled question.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Where is the "precision" and the "spiritual-scientific inquiry" in the emotionally triggered thought of a Catholic soul saying "Sorry POTUS, but I refuse to obey this order"? BTW you will notice, my point was not that a Catholic can do horrors, but that such observation (that a Catholic can do it) is an example of an alternative thought standing exactly at the same level as your own, which therefore stands out as wishful thinking, originating from personally preferred soul environments. My point was also that a belief system, like the Catholic faith and many others, is precisely what we need to overcome today, and doesn't guarantee an above-average moral response, at all. So, among the many reactive thoughts that the movie could trigger, yours is on the same exact plane as many others, and has no particular foundation other than personal wish and preference. That was my point.

The thought is merely a symbol for a deeper and objective set of circumstances encountered by the modern intellectual soul, especially over the last few decades. We could switch from the thought of a nuclear holocaust to something like online pornography, which may even be a bigger threat to the moral integrity of the developing soul (that grabs hold of this soul at younger and younger ages, in more and more depraved ways), and the idea remains the same. It points to a rapidly escalating epidemic of eroding the soul's cognitive-moral foundations, and without such foundations, there is zero chance for higher knowledge to infuse the Earthly spectrum. The fact is that the Church is the only institution in the modern world that even recognizes this epidemic and feels the need to resist it by educating souls about the spiritual foundations of their existence. That fact can be leveraged by Unknown Friends to contribute to the pursuit of higher knowledge, not by blasting the trumpet in the ears of souls that have already gone deaf, but by learning to speak their 'sign language'. These religious souls can begin to restore their sight of the spiritual gestures embedded within their familiar dogmas, doctrines, sacraments, etc., if only we take an active interest in developing the methods for them to do so.

By the way, I think Cleric is fully on board with the above up to that point. He then points to BD as the ideal means for such souls to restore inner integrity in a way that remains open to higher knowledge. And I agree that it would indeed be the ideal means, but sometimes ideals need to be prepared for and bridged to, given the realistic circumstances we are faced with. Very few devout religious souls will feel any interest in delving into BD's works and practices because they cannot recognize how precisely it overlaps with their familiar palette of ideas, which are highly rooted in the intellectual development of the West. That is where VT-MoT comes in. Yes, there are risks when the direct spiritual truths are 'tuned down' to generate more overlap in this way, but there are also clear advantages. PoF is a tuned-down version of spiritual science, and so is KHW in many ways, meant to overlap with the familiar palette of the modern philosophical and scientific thinker. Steiner clearly recognized this as the most critical step for advancing toward the spiritual soul, which is why he said PoF should be the work saved if everything else he produced were to burn.

[Kaje977]

I don't know if my input really means anything here, but to me The Church always intuitively seemed to me to be a "A home to always come back to (when everything lays astray)" and when one needs guidance and less an integral part of Evolution (although one can arguably say that if it does serve a certain function, it does have an impact and is a part of it). Now, technically, this could be any different place too, like an actual home of your family. But this one feels more archetypical, a home everyone can return to, young and old, female or male, orphans, rich and poor, every background, etc. And obviously it doesn't seem to be limited to The Church only, but similarly to other places of faith too, such as Mosques or Buddhist Temples. Holy Places, I'd say in general. In Occultism and Magick such divine places are also often understood to be inhabited by powerful Egregores and/or Spirits. Their aura and presence is clearly there, but subtle. And similarly it's important to not get totally emerged with these beings, because they nourish themselves with the "mental substance" that we produce when our thoughts are too adhered to them.

The Church, I claim, usually inhabits Well-Meaning Spirits and Egregores and usually attracts those to the places while it keeps out the ill-meaning beings (but it really depends on the specific place and location; Some places are cursed or are filled with Poltergeists, but you usually would feel that immediately), but take lodges, sects, Scientology, or even ill-lead fanatic interpretations of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and the like and their locations, and the Egregores there are not so friendly anymore, trying to lure and bind you to their place too. In the worst case, they can actually turn you into a total nutcase.

[Cleric]

Let’s try to understand the intellectual mode of existence with a practical problem. In today’s informational age, there are many techniques that aim to provide security for the communication channels. To understand the need for that, consider the classical man-in-the-middle attack. In the early ages of the Internet, almost all of the traffic was transmitted in plain form. This means that technically, anyone who can tap into the information flow can clearly see what is being exchanged – emails, chats, and so on. This corresponds to the possibility of a postal service worker eavesdropping on regular mail. This problem was quickly recognized, and many ways for encryption were provided. This, however, only solves the problem of privacy of the channel. For example, I may be communicating with my bank. The channel is encrypted. But there’s still a problem if in the place of the bank is an impostor. Thus, there’s a need to validate if the other side is who they claim to be. We use that every day in our browser – every modern website should use a secure connection (https), and the other side proves with a certificate and a secret (private) key that they indeed are the true owner of the domain. Here’s some more info:





Today, maybe most of us already have electronic signatures. The mechanism is the same. The technical details are interesting, but they are not strictly needed to grasp the general picture. The important thing is to understand how trust operates. In principle, I can generate myself a certificate for ownership of google.com. If I make a man-in-the-middle attack, I can intercept the channel and send back to the client a fabricated web page (like in phishing) together with the fake certificate. However, the user’s browser will try to verify the authenticity of the certificate. It will check who has issued the certificate. This leads me one step up in the chain. I get the issuer’s certificate and verify whether its key has been used to sign the fake certificate. If the verification is successful, I then go another step up to verify who has issued the issuer’s certificate. And so on, until the root self-signed certificate is reached. This is the point where we have no other option but simply to know whether we can trust this root certificate authority (CA) or not. Most users today are barely aware of these things, but every operating system, every browser comes with quite a few self-signed root CA certificates that are trusted by default. Basically, we trust the manufacturer of our device or OS to put there the root CAs they have decided. Thus, when my fake certificate fails to verify as a chain leading to a trusted root CA, the browser will display a big red warning.

This may seem like a very technical area, but it is really astounding how, if we grasp things in their more philosophical side, we have a very clear picture of the whole drama of intellectual existence. Every intellectual thought or idea exists in certain relations with other thoughts and ideas. We connect them through logical links and try to distill more general principles within which the more concrete facts fit. In the end, however, we reach inner intuitive forms that we can no longer trace further. These intuitive facts are like the root CAs, they are ‘self-signed’, and we can simply choose to trust them as axioms.



Such is also the case with religious dogma. It gives us intuitive forms which we can no longer trace to any more general authority. We simply need to put them in the ‘Trusted Root CAs’ folder. In our age, many people are aware of all this. Their consciousness has gradually risen to a stage where the trusted root certificates become questionable. And in one aspect, this is good. It is also the reason why turning back to religion can never be a solution, in the way many people, disappointed with modern culture, believe that we should step back and simply live by the moral rule of certain root CAs.

Returning for a moment to the technical side, we can appreciate how a single powerful chain of trust (CoT) may seem like something desirable. Many say, “I’m tired of having to work with different service providers, I need an account in Microsoft, in Google, in Apple… Wouldn’t everything be much easier if the whole world could agree on a single company and have one single universal account, within one all-encompassing CoT?”

If we think more deeply about it, we’ll see that this isn’t really possible. It can be asymptotically pursued, of course. In a free economy, it’s not going to happen. We can imagine that the government can force it, basically merging its CoT with that of the tech company. But still, this would still be one country among many. Then we can imagine that all countries are consolidated into a single World government. Yet, even then, there will likely be those counter-movements that seek to build independent CoTs based on other self-signed certificates, on other ideas.

So, in the Earthly intellectual existence, these are poles. One can never fully take over. It’s simply due to the fact that every human being, even if dimly, feels that in its spirit it can continuously emerge from or grow out of any root CA. Modern economics recognizes the emergence of monopolies as a bad sign. There are many good reasons for this. But one can say, “For religion, it is different. Because, in the end, there’s One Truth. The religion which has the most exact grasp of this Truth deserves to become the leading CoT, potentially unifying the whole world.” However, things can be seen in this way only if we do not suspect that there are higher modes of existence beyond the intellectual CoTs. No root certificate can capture the Truth. This is PoF 101. By the time we self-sign that certificate, it is already receding into the past. This is doubly so for religions that are founded on dogma passed through tradition. Thus, we are once again led to the familiar double-cone symbol.



It should be reminded that evolution doesn’t move us into the upper cone, but rather our centeredness becomes more and more focused – we become concentric with the Earth, the Sun, and so on. This is important to note, because we shouldn’t imagine that we can simply rise above the real CoTs and grasp them from above as in the image. These are only symbols. With the reality of these ideas, we’re much more enmeshed. It is difficult to have a clear intuition for the way our flow of existence is shaped by them.

This has been one of the important alerts that I’ve tried to raise about the Catholic project. Since it tries to sneakily navigate this double game of living in dogma root CAs (or at least acting like they are supported), and at the same time being conscious of the formative flow, it becomes quite difficult to differentiate what comes from where. I dare to say that the idea of the RCC spreading benevolently over the whole world can only result from such intermixing. We must feel this very clearly. There’s something tempting about having a single CoT, a single Microsoft account that is at the root of the chain. It is convenient. It also gives a sense of family, of unity. However, this can only result from a certain attachment to the chain. This is not merely dry intellectual matter. It’s not something that is simply being ‘thought’. These are real astral depths. They can be known. That’s why I said above that we’re far more enmeshed with these astral chains, into whose forms we live with the intellectual soul, even outside the body. The cerebral tokens are far from being the reality.

To add another technical image, consider the phenomenon of open source software. I don’t imply here the polarity between open source and closed source (proprietary) software, but only about how such projects appear ‘out of nowhere’, through the creative activity of individual human beings, unaffiliated with any of the large software corporations. This is related to the idea that the evolutionary impulse is planted in the RCC, and basically, our eyes should be on that CoT because the things significant for our future are expected to emerge from within it. I don’t want to push the analogy too far because there are many things that cannot be directly mapped. What I imply is that in our World it is natural that creative activity should manifest through many different ‘pores’, which do not need to conform to a CoT with a single root CA. If we could extract some valuable lesson from capitalism, it is that these processes are good for development. Of course, they degenerate when they become fierce competition. Rather, it’s like what Paul says, “Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Outdo yourselves in honoring one another.” So the positive competition is not to humiliate and destroy others but to bring the best possible from the spiritual world – not as a source of pride but as joy that we’re able to serve our brothers and sisters.

The other extremum is when these outlets of creative activity lack cohesion on a deeper ideal level. Then we have the atomization. So it’s not about mechanical balance between free enterprises and monopolies, but about seeking the deeper cohesion. This can only come about through a real, living understanding of the depth of reality. Yes, on the intellectual surface every statement of initiatic science sounds like a self-signed certificate, but it is not the intention of the researcher that his words should form a new monopoly CoT. They are invitation to seek the inner life from which the certificates precipitate. Thus, through the spiritual soul, we have a higher form of ‘signature verification’. There’s indeed a Divine root CA, but it is something that will be revealed till the end of Time.

And in this way we reach the major conflict in our age, between two epochs, two modes of cognition. The Church represents the mode that is fundamentally built around a CoT emerging from the root CA of dogma. This is seen as the immutable truth, until death or the second coming. The new impulse leads us toward the real-time experience of the flow of becoming, which sees every receding self-signed certificate as something condensing from the living spiritual activity of beings. As explained in previous posts, today, there’s no good reason to educate human beings in dogma whose root CA is supported exclusively by past revelations. This has simply passed its time. We would be training stubborn enemies of the new. Even the average materialist already feels that simply installing a certain religious root certificate doesn’t solve anything. Nevertheless, there are more than a few people today who believe that the return to religious CoT is the right thing to do. For example, someone like Ben Shapiro considers that the modern secular world fails to convince children from staying away from drugs, entering pre-marital intimate relations, etc. He sees that religious faith can do this better. Yet this is precisely the backtracking and merging with a given CoT. It is actually healthy for the modern soul not to want this. The question is whether it will find an alternative.

So can the Church be transformed from one that is strictly root CA-based (as it is today) to one of open operations along the Divine chain of Love? This is the big question. There’s a lot that spiritual research can elucidate about these things, but we must be free. We have spoken before, how in many cases we secretly sabotage our own potential for clear vision. For example, when we try to convince someone of our ideas, if we could take a moment to feel their karmic disposition, it could be obvious that we shouldn’t be talking about this to the person, or talk in another way. Yet, as long as our desire to impress our ideas on the other person is stronger, we repel any higher vision, because it would reveal the ineffectiveness of our desire. Something similar can be felt when we want to change the Church. Are we really interested in investigating the karma of the Church? Are we willing to see that it is indeed something ‘completely different’, as Steiner said, but that this statement has not only a positive side?

Many of us are aware of the ‘mission impossible’ when talking, for example, to our parents and trying to hint them at something spiritual. They are quite resistant to change. Well, we really need to multiply this thousandfold when we speak of the Church (because it is such a massive community). Then square it, because the Church officials are of the consciousness that they are here to teach us, not the other way around. This is not an exaggeration; we simply need to see clearly. The conversation here has made it look almost as if the Church is pretty much already there. Just a few more cardinals to read MoT, and things are likely to get moving. This is not, however, what a deeper look into the matters reveals. The karma of the Church is heavy. The Church has become a fortress of forces that are not willing to surrender. They have nothing to lose. For them, the true Light of Christ would be equivalent to death. As such, we have not yet really seen what the Church can be inspired into when these forces become desperate. This is important to understand. These forces cannot be convinced. They cannot say, “Oh, I now see what you mean, you are right.” This astral CoT, this trellis, amniotic sac, whatever we call it, is vital to them. Of course, this doesn’t concern only the Church, but the latter is certainly in a special position.

Now it can be said that it’s me who is possessed by the spirits of pessimism, and I’m working against the will of Christ by suggesting the above. Obviously, I cannot give formal proof of these things, but we should at least appreciate that we can only have clarity when we’re free, when we do not have emotional attachments that make us see only one side of the face. I’m not in the least saying that the Church is simply destined to rot. No, what I say is that this project is far, far more serious than we are willing to see. It’s a project that is being developed in the Cosmic depths, because we’re speaking of Cosmic-scale, evolutionary-scale karma here. If that could only be veered off by a book and a good wish! I’ll not comment anything now about VT, but I’ll only repeat what I said previously – MoT is written in such a way that it can become an excellent tool in the hands of these forces that strive to preserve and expand the CoT.

The Church has always been aware of the occult matters. There were true dangers there, and thus the motivation to prosecute heresy. To what extent this has always been in service of Christ, especially in the later centuries, is another question, and also related to the karma in question. In our age, it no longer speaks well to burn people at the stake. Furthermore, the occult sciences (no matter how decadent in form) are everywhere. It’s impossible in our informational age to suppress them. Thus, if the Church is to expand its CoT, it needs a new strategy. It has already shown this will to expand in various ways. As a random example, the very subtle tolerance of same-sex relations. Similarly, the Church needs to have a proper handling of the occult matters. In the eyes of the officials, MoT could be a priceless tool. It surveys the occult crafts, like Astrology, Kabbalah, Tarot, and so on, and in a unique way connects them to the RCC. These officials do not read MoT and find there inspiration about how to transform the Church into its future dogma-free version. They read it and see the possibility for souls to receive what they have appetite for – deeper soul experiences – yet remain fully tethered to the CoT. And remember, we’re not speaking of formal attachments here. These are real astral processes. This makes things even more serious, because now the Church can claim not only these chains that belong to the sensory-intellectual world, but also astral real estate. We really need to shake off our emotions here and consider the seriousness of the situation. It is fully possible that souls will be bred with developed astral vision. However, in the lack of proper, unbiased, and free spiritual development, this vision is color blind for certain aspects. One such aspect is that only the good side is seen in the trellis. It is seen as Divine, and thus one tethers oneself to it in full confidence. Unfortunately, the treatment of evil in MoT makes the job of these forces so much easier. When we look for evil only outside of us (where it needs to be quietly observed from a safe distance), we never expect that we need to differentiate it from within our own enmeshments. It should be remembered that the astral world could be very treacherous. In our physical space, we know the three dimensions, we have orientation. In the soul world, however, the labyrinth is far more complicated. Its junctions are not left-right, up-down, but we enter very different streams of destiny through our desires, inclinations, preferences. In space, since we are so well familiar with the three dimensions, when I take a step in the right corridor, I still have an intuitive sense that there’s something to the left that I can eventually backtrack and investigate. Not so simple in the soul flow. Without the panoramic intuition that only a proper spiritual science can give, we can very easily take a turn in astral space and not feel it as a turn at all. We do not feel that there’s an alternative path that we have left in another direction. For such reasons, we must be aware that a whole breed of Catholic astral seers can swarm, who will have a very specific ‘map’ of the soul world. Their beacon will be the self-signed root CA. Not its intellectual token but its astral reality. That would be like the ‘origin of the coordinate system’ of soul space. These souls will seek the astral image of Christ within this root CA. The living, the Greater Guardian, will be missed.

I’m worried that everything I say will be taken simply as the next biased attack on the Church. However, such things need to be said. I’m not speaking against the Church but for reality. We need to understand what we’re up against. We’re looking at only half of reality, and indeed, the most pleasant surface of that half, when we envision how the Church will service people, how they will commune, and so on. But there’s also a deeper, very concerning reality. You know how doctors gather in their pre-op sessions to review the data, the scans, and make extensive plans when the case is complicated. Such plans are being made for humanity’s evolution on very high. It’s not at all easy to find a way for the transformation of the Church, which will be with minimal blood loss and complications. We can barely do something in this direction individually. As said before, we should focus on saving the souls, not saving the Church. At this time, the souls at the periphery of the Church are more important (in the sense that there could be something that we individually could do) than those further in.

But very importantly, we should very carefully investigate our inner motives. If we’re enthusiastic about the project because we feel the need for a community, our intuition can easily go disproportionate. This is like trying to change our parents without wanting to know anything about their karma, the lessons that they need to learn, but simply because we hold on to a dream image of how great it would be if we could sit together and share in the same ideas and feelings that we presently entertain. This is not to say that we should become cold-blooded. It's exactly the opposite - we can only help others in the best way if we continuously widen the horizons of our understanding and seek to see what objectively contributes to the common flow in the best way.

[AshvinP]

Thanks, Cleric, for sharing your meditations on this topic again. These are great points of departure for a potentially fruitful exploration and discussion. Let's start with something from MoT:

Neither Satan, nor Belial, nor Lucifer, nor Mephistopheles have ever deprived anyone of his freedom. Temptation is their only weapon and this presupposes the freedom of he who is tempted. But possession by an "evil spirit" has nothing to do with temptation. It is invariably the same thing as with Frankenstein's monster. One engenders an elemental being and one subsequently becomes the slave of one's own creation. The "demons" or "evil spirits" of the New testament are called today in psychotherapy "neuroses of obsession", "neuroses or fear", "fixed ideas", etc. They have been discovered by contemporary psychiatrists and are recognised as real— i.e. as "parasitic psychic organisms" independent of the conscious human will and tending to subjugate it. But the devil is not there to no avail —although not in the sense of direct participation. He observes the law—which protects human freedom and is the inviolable convention between the hierarchies of the "right" and those of the "left"—and never violates it, as stands out in the example of the story of Job. One need not fear the devil, but rather the perverse tendencies in oneself! For these perverse human tendencies can deprive us of our freedom and enslave us. Worse still, they can avail themselves of our imagination and inventive faculties and lead us to creations which can become the scourge of mankind. The atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb are flagrant examples of this.

Man with the possible perversity of his warped imagination is far more dangerous than the devil and his legions. For man is not bound by the convention concluded between heaven and hell; he can go beyond the limits of the law and engender arbitrarily malicious forces whose nature and action are beyond the framework of the law. . .such being the Molochs and other "gods" of Canaa, Phoenecia. Carthage, ancient Mexico and other lands, which exacted human sacrifice. One has to guard against accusing the beings of the hierarchies of evil to their detriment of having played the role of Molochs, these being only creatures of the perverse collective human will and imagination. These are egregores, engendered by collective perversity, just as there exist the "demons" or "evil spirits" engendered by individuals.

So the idea that VT does not emphasize the forces of evil within oneself, is simply a misunderstanding. I believe the reason it is misunderstood is that too much focus is placed on the surface-level content, perhaps colored by a certain conception of what he is 'up to', rather than what VT is doing throughout all of the meditations. He is subtly saying, "There is no need to focus all your efforts on intellectually investigating this or that evil being of the hierarchies, but rather begin transforming the evil within yourself. As soon as you begin this purifying work, the evil beings will come to meet you and make their presence known! They will initially resist your efforts every step of the way. Except now, when you meet them in full consciousness, they will also begin to be experienced simultaneously as adversaries and servants/friends, rather than hypothetical forces of evil out there in the world." This is a point you have also made several times on this forum. As long as we remain patient and work through the meditations, this is the unmistakable impression we get from VT's inner process. I hope the above can give us some sense of how we may be prejudging things with VT-MoT.

Now, moving on. As I understand it, the perspective is that MoT has barely penetrated the Church, and we are simply wearing rose-colored glasses if we expect that a few cardinals here and there contemplating MoT means the Church's karma could be redeemed in a different, positive direction. At the same time, the perspective has also become that, if MoT makes headway with the priests and parishioners, it will then become an excellent tool for preserving the intellectual CoT. It's a classic "damned if you don't, damned if you do" scenario, at least for the fate of the Church. And I can appreciate, in all seriousness, the stark reality you desire for us to meditate on here. In short, we need to soberly confront the fact that we, as souls within the John stream, have zero input in giving direction to the karmic momentum of, not only the Church, which is one central example, but all modern cultural institutions.

We really need to shake off our emotions here and consider the seriousness of the situation.

Yes, exactly. Once we distance ourselves from the specific question of the Church, and all the emotions and conceptions the idea of the Church immediately brings to mind, we will begin to see how everything that was so nicely described is not at all unique to the Church. If we substitute "religious dogma" for "scientific model" and "Church" for "scientific academy", literally everything else can be mapped onto it in a 1:1 way. We can speak of the scientific models that constellate the default modern understanding of reality as the intellectual CoT chain. We can speak of how most publicly disseminated scientific research is concentrated within a few universities, labs, corporations, and so on. We can speak of the public figureheads that are steering the general direction, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sabine Hoffenfelder, Michael Levin, Elon Musk, etc. Not in a million years would any of these individuals consider themselves students, rather than teachers, of esoteric scientists. They feel they have nothing to learn from people spewing out what they see as updated ancient mythology, philosophy, and religion. And when Levin develops his technologies for 'first-person science', he will breed a den of elemental seers who continually take wrong turns in astral space.

The reason we are probably hesitant to take this broader viewpoint is because, then, it may become a little too clear to us how hopeless our communal situation has become, at least in the near-term. It may start to hit us like a ton of bricks (which is not to say we shouldn't be hit, because we should be). If we are following your indications here correctly and seriously, that is exactly what we need to become clear to ourselves about. Not only do we need to work on ourselves before trying to change the World from within the center, we need to frankly admit that there is zero chance of the latter, no matter what we do or don't do. Our work on the periphery should be expected to remain only on the periphery for the foreseeable future. Any other expectation is born of unexamined motives, desires, attachments, etc., and thus feeds right into the hands of the adversaries.

Someone may come along and say, "Perhaps we need to launch a Spiritual Scientific project. We won't start disseminating the deepest facts of esoteric wisdom immediately, but we will try to speak in the language of philosophy and science and gradually disseminate the resulting ideas to leading figures in a position of influence like Eduard von Hartmann. It will be a work about freeing the human soul from its conditioned perspective on the World Content, by becoming more intimately conscious of that perspective. It will stimulate souls to autonomously and spontaneously pursue the spectrum of shared moral imaginations and intuitions, which then leads to a natural harmony of perspectives and ideals without any forceful and coercive intellectual CoT chain".

And, from our sober perspective, we should respond, "You have no idea what you're up against here. You don't realize the seriousness of what's happening within the Cosmic depths, where the karma of this scientific academy has taken shape. Your supposedly transformative work won't make any inroads into this megalithic community of professional philosophers, scientists, and tech giants. And, even when it does, this will be exactly what the adversaries are looking for! They will change strategies - instead of persecuting the spiritual scientists, they will begin using the concepts of "intuitive thinking" and "moral imagination" as the new form of intellectual CoT. Yes, I know that souls who work with your book properly will not only remain with concepts but will experience how their thoughts about the content manifest within the streamlines of their actual intuitive thinking, but that is quite irrelevant to how it will be received and utilized by the dark forces at work in these institutions. Every step of progress made in this direction of inner freedom will be met by three steps in the opposite direction."

You see, if we truly distance our emotions from this perspective, we cannot help but see how broadly it applies to the cultural landscape and its megalithic institutions. Nothing is truly decentralized anymore, determined by communities at the periphery (it may only appear that way in our internet age, but even these tools are centralized within a few giant corporations). And this perspective even applies to those peripheral communities if we are clear-headed about it. Even you pointed out previously how Waldorf education, for example, has degenerated into chains of intellectual trust certificates. Most of the teachers don't even work through Steiner, and those who do, likely fit his content into their personal motives for teaching, their personal understanding of 'what is best for the children', just as Church leaders view themselves as teaching what is best for religious souls. Indeed, this is the stark and sober reality we need to face without emotional attachments. Even spiritual science can (and has) become an excellent CoT tool in the hands of the dark spirits.

Then, we should decide as a matter of sacrosanct individual freedom, whether we feel this sober perspective itself may contribute to preserving its own reality, like in one of those time-traveling movies where the character goes into the past to change things, but everything he does ends up leading to the same desolate wasteland of his present time. It is only on the physical plane where the 'sober truth' can be something seemingly independent of our perspective on the 'objective' relations and circumstances. When it comes to the spiritual worlds that seed the future objective landscape, our perspective on the 'truth' always participates in what is True. We are all instinctively active in the depths (granted, some of us more consciously), and the perspective we adopt immediately reverberates within and modulates countless other perspectives responsible for the World flow. As I see it, there is simply no such thing as higher spiritual vision that communicates out of itself the answers to these questions. The sober truth of the matter is rather decided by the way we ask and answer such questions through our thoughts, feelings, and deeds. Whether the cultural centers will remain as an unquestionable vacuum for spirits of darkness to occupy is not only a matter of karmic momentum, but our conscious perspective on that karma. This is PoF 101, it is the beating heart of the Christ impulse.

We also need to seriously contemplate how much the adversaries may be salivating over the prospect of spiritual seekers describing what may otherwise be one of the most transformative spiritual works of the 20th century (perhaps the most transformative after WWII), as one of their excellent tools. This isn't something they need to take shares in and hope it pays off big in the future, like our emotional attachment to the Church project, but it is a perspective we adopt that provides an immediate return on their investment. What could make their work of hindrance easier and be more pleasing in their sight than John souls voluntarily confining themselves to the periphery, even when their shared moral intuitions begin attracting them toward the center? What could be more enjoyable than the prospect that the Earthly sandbox will be understood by these souls as being their de facto arena to play around in and shape to their liking? These are also uncomfortable questions that can be meditated and prayed upon, in all seriousness. We can consider the possibility that our willingness to patiently and imaginatively explore the Church question is not only a romantic and occluded vision of what is possible, but also a part of the inner work that shapes the higher-order perspectives of the World flow and thus contributes to what will be possible.

I am seriously not trying to agitate for one position or another here. I can somewhat clearly sense the extreme risks in both directions, which don't reside at our surface level of rationality but within the astral depths. I simply think it is incumbent upon us to consider how these astral depths work in many subtle ways. The moment we feel we have arrived at the firmest grasp of what this Church question is 'all about', is also the moment when we are least likely to notice what is subtly steering our imagination from within the depths.

[Federica]

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.

All I can say is that I hope Cleric has attained a somewhat different perspective on the matter after subsequent discussion, as I'm sure Rodriel and I have from his posts. I also don't think he is so firmly planted in these ideas as you imagine him to be, because he is fundamentally engaged in a different sort of inquiry, one that serves as a beginning, an invitation to deeper contemplation of the inner dynamics, rather than an ending, a satisfying conclusion about VT's retrograde forces and what not. It's the same with all the cautions that I issued to Rodriel before. It's simply a different level of discussion, aimed at quite different things. This is why you see stark opposition in all the characterizations, and then think I am trying to force them into agreement. This is simply an artifact of the way you are approaching the topic in the first place. Steiner continually stressed how, when we are trying to approach and discuss true supersensible experience, we must become accustomed to these 'contradictions', because the flow of life itself is filled with such contradictions as we examine it from different angles. He pointed this out in Human and Cosmic Thought, for example, with respect to all the debates between nominalism v. realism, materialism v. idealism, etc. I imagine you will find all of this to be irrelevant, but if we think about it deeply enough, we will see how it applies in these Steiner-VT discussions as well.

I think it’s necessary to distinguish between the 12 'signs' of human thought on the one hand - the various worldviews illustrated in the “Human and Cosmic Thought” lectures, worldly reflections of the highest perspectives in the world of Spirit symbolized in the Zodiac - and specific astral realities on the other hand. Just because the 12 worldviews can all be defended in human thought and have appropriate spheres of application or resonance, which spiritual science is able to synthetize in higher cognition, doesn’t mean that all astral forms and currents are all equally valid in their own space, and ultimately united, or unitable, within a morally consistent higher synthesis.

In other words, the objective existence of the 12 worldviews and their spiritual background is no justification for imagining that VTs expressed conceptions can be seamlessly transformed into, and reconciled with, their opposite, by way of subtle and loose integration, or by way of considering them “at a different level of discussion, aimed at quite different things”. There are indeed no contradictions among the 12 worldviews that can’t be synthesized at a higher level, by means of spiritual-scientific inquiry. But there is indeed an objective contradiction between VT’s explicit rejection of spiritual science (and related split in human activity) and Rudolf Steiner’s unifying and unified consciousness. This contradiction is not only discursive, but persists across cognitive levels.

It’s true that the more one detaches consciousness from the manifoldness of the earthly spectrum, the more the impulse is to approach the objectivity of supersensible reality, and the less one encounters nominalisms, realisms, or any other reflected worldviews and their apparent contradictions. But the problem with the Steiner-Tomberg question is that it’s not a simple discord of worldviews that can be synthesized as you want to do, by deeply thinking about it. Spiritual Science is not a worldview, but rather the path along which a synthesis of them all becomes integrated, whereas Tomberg’s Hermetic perspective, contextualized as it is within the astral realm and within some particular astral CoTs in that environment, doesn’t operate on an equal footing. In a way, it prefers to take sides, which is why it must simultaneously reject the unifying spiritual-scientific impulse.

I am not sure whether Imaginative cognition, through which we 'metamorphose through the axiomatic arcanic patterns', is being understood correctly. When Steiner describes the experience of Imaginative cognition, do you also feel it is 'strictly lawful, not free' and could therefore be described as a kind of CGOL (which, to me, describes inner gestures which are mechanical and rooted in fixed rules)?

The point is that imaginative cognition and arcana cognition intersect but do not coincide. What I have described as astral CGOL referes to the arcana experience.