Nietzsche and Christianity - Metaphysical Idealist Critique

[Eugene I]

Indeed! Now how do we get Eugene to accept Christ as his Lord and Savior?? Just kidding... kind of.

How about accepting the Buddha as one of the incarnations of Christ?

[AshvinP]

Indeed! Now how do we get Eugene to accept Christ as his Lord and Savior?? Just kidding... kind of.

How about accepting the Buddha as one of the incarnations of Christ?

I don't know about who is an incarnation of whom, but I am confident the Buddha is a great Spirit whose influence still pervades the world today.

[Lou Gold]

Indeed! Now how do we get Eugene to accept Christ as his Lord and Savior?? Just kidding... kind of.

How about accepting the Buddha as one of the incarnations of Christ?

I don't know about who is an incarnation of whom, but I am confident the Buddha is a great Spirit whose influence still pervades the world today.

Since Christianity denies reincarnation it might difficult to see the Buddha as one of the incarnations of Christ. The other way around would be plausible from a Buddhist pov and from the timeline. I dunno about causality but I'm surely grateful that the Great Mysteriousness gave us both of them (and many more).

[AshvinP]

How about accepting the Buddha as one of the incarnations of Christ?

I don't know about who is an incarnation of whom, but I am confident the Buddha is a great Spirit whose influence still pervades the world today.

Since Christianity denies reincarnation it might difficult to see the Buddha as one of the incarnations of Christ. The other way around would be plausible from a Buddhist pov and from the timeline. I dunno about causality but I'm surely grateful that the Great Mysteriousness gave us both of them (and many more).

Not Steiner's Anthroposophy. To be a Christian is to follow Christ, nothing more nothing less.

[Lou Gold]

I don't know about who is an incarnation of whom, but I am confident the Buddha is a great Spirit whose influence still pervades the world today.

Since Christianity denies reincarnation it might difficult to see the Buddha as one of the incarnations of Christ. The other way around would be plausible from a Buddhist pov and from the timeline. I dunno about causality but I'm surely grateful that the Great Mysteriousness gave us both of them (and many more).

Not Steiner's Anthroposophy. To be a Christian is to follow Christ, nothing more nothing less.

I'm not familiar with Steiner's Anthroposophy. Does he assert it is possible to follow Christ with no doctrinal interpretation?

[Cleric]

I'm not familiar with Steiner's Anthroposophy. Does he assert it is possible to follow Christ with no doctrinal interpretation?

Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science is the natural continuation in cognitive evolution. It is something real that is independent of whatever name we give it. Just as natural science is something that emerges from the interaction of man with the sensory perceptions no matter how we call it, so spiritual science is what we call when man penetrates spiritual reality. The real trouble is that this cognitive continuation is not simply an extension of the intellect, that is, it's not about some better theory or model of reality. This is exactly what should be overcome. The intellect has already hit the ceiling so to speak. This is what we've spoken with Eugene. Through pure thinking we reach at most to the thinking core that sees reality as a world of perceptions that can be worked upon with ideas. But the ego, the thinking itself, is still Maya. This we can't transcend through thinking itself. Steiner says:

We must acknowledge with intellectual humility our impotence to penetrate the universe with understanding by means of the natural gifts with which we are born; and we must then admit that there may be ways of self-development and of unfolding the inner powers of our being to see in that which lies spread out before the senses the living spirit and the living soul.

My writings to which I have referred show that it is possible to put this in practice. This must be said, because intellectualism, the fruit of evolution of the last few centuries, is no longer able to solve the riddles of life. Into one region of life, that of inanimate nature, it is able to penetrate, but it is compelled to halt before human reality, more especially social reality.

And this is a real problem for science and spirituality alike. Science is utterly dependent on the intellect. So to speak, the spirit, while it operates in the scientifically-intellectual mode, is bound to always feel the rigidity of the brain. That's why, neither physicalism, nor idealism really overcome the intellect. Spirituality on the other hand, either resorts to faith, as in the major religions today, or to mysticism, which sees the reverting of consciousness to its pre-cognitive state as the actual solution. Unfortunately the latter, by its very nature, can only perpetuate the dual nature of Earthly and Cosmic life. We reach some form of the Cosmic within the mystical state but the intellect collapses there - the intellect simply doesn't belong there - it is a pre-intellect state. Yet we are bound to it in our Earthly life. This leads to the various philosophies that have no choice but to see the Earthly stage as something that has no solution in itself but will be overcome after death.

We should really appreciate the situation here. The intellect collapses in the mystical state. In other words, the intellect can only know something up to the point of its own collapse. The intellect doesn't learn anything about Cosmic life itself. It has no choice but to surrender to it in acceptance of its impotence and await whatever may come after death. And it is exactly here that we should be perfectly aware - anything that we fantasize in this way about the beyond will forever remain the object of belief. In our conversation with Eugene, the vision of the individual spaces liberated from the Earthly bounds is not something that we discover as some hard fact within the objective state of thinking about the world of perceptions. It is a vision, an extrapolation of this state, that we believe will happen after we lose the body. If we grasp this, and if we really want to deal with reality, and not only with the intellect's hopeful vision for the beyond, we have no choice but delve into the roots of the intellect itself. Not collapse it in exchange of the sweet flow, where we no longer have to deal with subject and object but to attain to a stage of consciousness where we behold the coming together of the ego and its intellect as if from 'outside'.

Things stand in such a way that the threshold to this new stage of consciousness is no other but the same threshold that we'll cross anyway at the moment of death. There's nothing deadly in this. It's actually a threshold to Life. It would be more appropriate to say that we are much more dead while living in the body than outside it. While we are united with the mineral processes of our body we're actually constantly dying. It's the nature of the mineral world that it constantly moves towards dissipation, towards the heat death, as the scientist would put it. While we are united with this process we continuously experience dying. Actually only when we cast the body aside we can experience real Life, independent of the dissolution process. And this is what the higher stage of consciousness is about - through self-development we attain to the stage of consciousness that can temporarily extricate itself from the mineral process, something that we otherwise experience only at the moment of death. The mystical states don't lead to consciousness beyond the threshold. They may lead to dream experience of the beyond but the intellect stays strictly on the mineral side and receives only dream pictures of it, visions which must be interpreted. The intellect doesn't experience actual crossing of the threshold. To gain the form of cognizing consciousness beyond the mystical flow one needs not only death (the collapse of the intellect) but also resurrection. And that's where we find the whole science of the Christ.

We only approach the Christ if we conceive of a living science of existence as a whole. There's no Christ within the world of the sensory perceptions, intellect and beliefs. We can only speak of Christ if he becomes the object of experience in the same way that the Sun is the object of experience for science. But this object simply doesn't exist within intellectual thinking - it is hidden behind the forces that animate the intellect but can't be seen by the intellect itself. We can have a concept, a picture of it, but not the reality. That's why it's not about following some doctrine blindly that may or may not turn out to be right after death but to solve the problem of death while we're still alive. Only in this way the spiritual world will gain reality for us. As long as we are bound to the intellect we only have a screen of perceptions and its interpretations. The reality of the spiritual world is not about adding additional layer of perceptions that should be interpreted and divined by the intellect but is the actual living reality that stands hidden behind the intellect.

The Gospel must be deepened by spiritual science if we wish to gain an actual grasp of the Christ. It is then interesting to examine the separate Gospels and arrive at their real content. To accept the Gospel as it is and as numberless people accept it today, and particularly as it is taught today, is not a path to Christ; it is a path away from Christ. Hence the confessions are moving further and further away from Christ. To what sort of Christ-conception does a man come who will accept the Gospel and only the Gospel, without the depth given by spiritual science? He comes ultimately to a Christ — but that is the utmost that he can reach through the Gospel alone. It is not a reality of the Christ, for today only spiritual science can lead to that. What the Gospel leads to is an hallucination of the Christ, a real inner picture or vision, yet only a picture. The Gospel today provides the way to come to a vision of the Christ, but not to the reality of Christ. That is just the reason why modern theology has become so materialistic. Theological commentators and expounders of the Gospel have asked themselves: What is to be made of the Gospel? They decide at length that in their view the result is similar to what one gets when one examines the case of Paul before Damascus. And then these theologians, who are supposed to confirm Christianity, but who really undermine it, say: Paul was simply ill, suffering from nerves and he had a vision before Damascus.

The point is that through the Gospel itself one can come only to hallucinations, to visions, but not to realities; the Gospel does not give us the real Christ, but only an hallucination of the Christ. The real Christ must be sought today through all that can be gained from a spiritual knowledge of the world.

[Lou Gold]

I'm not familiar with Steiner's Anthroposophy. Does he assert it is possible to follow Christ with no doctrinal interpretation?

Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science is the natural continuation in cognitive evolution.
etc
etc
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[/quote]

Here we go again. My simple question is whether Anthroposophy says that it is possible to follow Christ without these lengthy interpretive explanations. What is wrong with a 'yes' or 'no' response? I really understand that all sciences are based on doctrines. Can one follow Christ without a science?

[Cleric]

I really understand that all sciences are based on doctrines.

I don't know what you understand by doctrine. Some sciences really begin with assumptions that they begin to build upon. But take botany. Whatever botany finds about a rose is not dependent on any doctrine. As long as we stay within the sensory facts we are on solid ground. When we understand that water, air and sunlight are important for the growth of the rose we're too firmly true to the facts. But when we develop mathematical theory of strings and try to explain all reality through that, we are doing something completely different. We create mental construction and project it onto the sensory world. Now we are working within a doctrine.

Now I'm speaking of science only in the former sense - as something that simply recognizes and orients itself within the facts of experience. If you ask me whether one can follow the Christ without such a science, without recognition and orientation within both sensory and spiritual facts, the answer is firm 'no'.

[Lou Gold]

I really understand that all sciences are based on doctrines.

I don't know what you understand by doctrine. Some sciences really begin with assumptions that they begin to build upon. But take botany. Whatever botany finds about a rose is not dependent on any doctrine. As long as we stay within the sensory facts we are on solid ground. When we understand that water, air and sunlight are important for the growth of the rose we're too firmly true to the facts. But when we develop mathematical theory of strings and try to explain all reality through that, we are doing something completely different. We create mental construction and project it onto the sensory world. Now we are working within a doctrine.

Now I'm speaking of science only in the former sense - as something that simply recognizes and orients itself within the facts of experience. If you ask me whether one can follow the Christ without such a science, without recognition and orientation within both sensory and spiritual facts, the answer is firm 'no'.

I feel that following Christ (or Buddha, Lao Tzu, etc) as something that simply recognizes and orients itself within the facts of experience. Do we agree?

[Cleric]

I feel that following Christ (or Buddha, Lao Tzu, etc) as something that simply recognizes and orients itself within the facts of experience. Do we agree?

I don't know what you mean. If you mean that it's all the same, as long as one goes with the instinctive flow - no, I don't agree