Eugene I wrote: ↑Fri May 14, 2021 2:13 pm
I never said ""pure" awareness-being without ideal content". I never claimed that "pure awareness" exists
without ideal content. So you are again addressing a wrong issue.
But here is where the real issue is. You said that " there are three aspects of Reality which are all fundamental and inseparable -
willing, feeling, thinking. . " And I am saying that you are
missing other fundamental, immanent and inseparable aspects of reality (beingness and awareness) that are irreducible to
willing, feeling, thinking. And that is exactly where your interpretation of spiritual science is incomplete. And with such interpretation you even go against Steiner's own formulation of spiritual science where he said
One cannot of course let thinking arise without having brought about consciousness beforehand.
Steiner
Eugene, over and over again the problem comes from the fact that you want to put hard boundary between the forms of spiritual activity. Yes, intellectual thinking and its rigid concepts was the last to arrive and it will be the first to go when we continue with our evolution. This was illustrated in the slides in the Deep M@L essay. The most fundamental form of spiritual activity that we can reach is of the kind of will imbued with meaning, with creative goal, so to speak. What you call fundamental, immanent is still a conscious state of a spiritual being. Here we experience things precisely in the 'direct' way you mention and what is called Intuitive consciousness. There are no intellectual concepts in this state, but there's still meaning. Actually the meaning is infinitely more clear and all-encompassing than that which can be captured by disparate concepts. That's why we can speak of ideation even at this level, even if it is not the ideation of the intellect and in fact we can have clarity on this form of ideating activity only through advanced meditation. What you call the
other aspects of reality (beingness and awareness) we cannot even formulate in this way in the world of Intuition. We can speak of beingness and awareness only through our intellect. In the higher world we are completely united with our meaningful activity. We don't have the means to project it into a concept and say "awareness is what truly exists".
It's for this reason that thinking, feeling, willing are not 'other' aspects of reality but the
gradient of spiritual activity. Currently we are awake spiritual beings within thinking and from here we work on to metamorph towards the higher forms of activity.
We can make an analogy with physics here. The four fundamental forces are thought to have been united as
one force in the primordial state. Then as the universe cools down they differentiate into different forces. This is very crude analogy, that could be quite misleading, but it makes the point that in the primordial state there is a unified spiritual activity which is nevertheless ideating, meaningful. Through the eons of evolution, this activity was 'delaminated' and we now have our lucid being only in thinking. It's also important to mention that what we experience today as will, from the standpoint of our ordinary consciousness, is
not the same as the primordial unified spiritual activity. The primordial activity we can know only through higher development in meditation, when we really come to know that state.
No one here argues that the concepts of the intellect (which you seem to mistake for ideas in the general sense) are the foundation of reality. They are at best rigidified points of reference. Much like chocks used in rock climbing to give points of support. But it makes no sense to speak of 'awareness-being' as something completely independent of, or 'above', the forms of spiritual activity (t, f, w).