Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 12, 2026 4:56 pm
The big question arising from this is whether a rigorous spiritual science phenomenology — a concentration which yields experience structured as vertical Time-Consciousness, coherence and decoherence, stability and differentiation — generates veridical historical and cosmological content. One may have a very strong first-person luminosity, but it seems though, in the case of Steiner where that inference left auditable tracks, the tracks were, at least on occasion, found wanting.
Once again, it is crucial that we grasp the order of things here. The first book ever that I read by Steiner was
Cosmic Memory. What immediately struck me was that things were presented not through pictures of what the past looked like through some hypothetical physical eyes, but through attempts to describe the
conscious experience of these past stages of the human being. This was for me a fundamentally different approach from anything I had seen before. Even the New Age mumbo-jumbo, when speaking of such past stages, speaks as if a present human being could travel to the past and simply observe and describe the landscape, the supposed technologies, and so on. This is also the reason why such phantasmagories are summoned in relation to these things. New agers
extrapolate the present human condition and fantasize about a civilization with advanced but lost
physical technologies, cities, etc. No wonder the geological record can't confirm anything about this. Instead, Steiner described facts about inner conditions. For example, he describes how in the far past the conscious experience of human beings was such that they felt concentric with the past of their ancestors. Just as we today can trace our present state back toward our personal childhood, so these beings felt that their life sprouted out from a common stream, like a blossom on a common tree. When they looked back toward their origins, they could feel how their present
inner condition had grown (differentiated) as a branch from a common tree. It is as if their inner perspective has been following an uninterrupted stream of inner life of the ancestors as it grew from one another until it reaches the present state.
These things look fantastic only as long as we try to imagine them through our present intellectual habits. Our inner life remains in the blind spot of existence while we are dreamily engaged in arranging mental puzzle pieces of branches, trees, and so on. We reshuffle them in countless ways and in the end say—"This doesn't make any sense. Whatever I do, all I have in the end is this patchwork of thought images. It all feels so arbitrary and volatile." Yet, everything receives a different hue if we in fact try to conceive what it would be like if we could feel our past as a continuation of a whole stream of human destinies. This is uncomfortable, for sure. It immediately shakes the sovereignty of our ego. We say, "
Externally tracing my existence down the physical bloodline—that I can do. But feeling my inner individual perspective joining with and differentiating from a common spiritual stream is too much to ask for! I refuse to give up my dissociative boundary."
So the investigations of SS require that we attain the needed inner mobility. If we feel a kind of fear or disgust at the idea that our most intimate inner life is in reality an interference of perspectives, we'll face the greatest obstacle in grasping what SS speaks of. We'll only seek to picture things through cold, abstract mental images patched together in various combinations and imagine that they are merely pointers toward something speculative far away on the other side of the dissociative boundary. No wonder these thoughts will always feel floating and uncertain.
The leeway between deeper inner facts and sensory ones (like the geological records) must and will be gradually closed. In fact, this will be one of the most exciting things occupying human scientific activity from now on. Anything that Steiner provided in this respect must be seen as very early sprouts in this direction. We must not imagine that higher cognition leads us into a state where we can simply generate the facts of the decohered world from a few initial principles. If this were possible, it would imply that there is a kind of determinism—that there's only one way the present world state can be reached from an initial seed condition. However, this state has been reached by continuously taking non-deterministic turns at every step. Yes, the general envelope of potential at different scales provides certain constraints on what turns can be taken, but to trace the exact way in which certain geological layers were compounded, we would have to enter the concrete metamorphoses, which were actively driven by the activity of beings. Seen in this way, SS doesn't simply give us a handful of higher axioms that we can then imaginatively simulate, generate hypothetical worlds with, and then say, "See, these are the right axioms because my imaginatively generated world matches exactly the one I experience in the rest of my phenomenal spectrum."
We are still at a stage where we are in a kind of 'hybrid' scientific mode. Spiritual science in the form it appeared is still something transitional (and Steiner was clear about this too). We are standing with one foot in the intellectual consciousness that builds sparse pictures of imagined worlds and compares them with the rest of the phenomenal spectrum. The other foot is only barely starting to step into the real-time stream. The more we step there, the more our own thinking bursts will be grasped as intrinsic harmonics of the World-state flow. Then it is no longer a question of myopically staring through a narrow aperture at the images of hypothetical worlds that these harmonics paint, but of grasping how inner life is embedded in the greater inner life. Gradually, theorizing and rehearsing our inner activity within mental simulations before letting it flow into the wider stream will lose its significance; instead, we'll be more involved in the real-time steering of the World state's becoming and observing the immediate feedback of the total phenomenal spectrum.
Additionally, when trying to solve the mysteries of the geological record, we'll have to consider certain things that are certainly a thorn in the side of modern physicalists—although their own science already indicates such things! Take, for example, the atomic model. In the early 20th century, many scientists would insist on a
rational view, imagining the electron as a well-defined chunk of matter orbiting the nucleus. They held the conviction that if they could shrink to that scale, they would be able to see the electron orbiting, just like we see the Moon orbiting the Earth. QM shook that vision fundamentally. Those who could not adapt to these new unintuitive ideas had to simply die off with their convictions rather than try to adopt new kinds of thinking. We all know Planck's principle:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”
Now, with such wisdom of hindsight, wouldn't it be sad if we do not take it into consideration and seek the needed flexibility to always feel at a certain stage of metamorphosis, instead of cementing our intellect in a certain configuration and choosing to die standing rather than change our shape?
Even though we now live in the 21st century, we're still slow to take these truths to heart. This holds true for geology as well, where there are more than enough unsolved problems. But probably the most striking example is the problem of the origin of biological life. It is here that scientists behave exactly like the thinkers of who insisted that the electron must be followable by sight. In the same manner, it is imagined that if a human eye had been present in the past, it would have been able to observe how inorganic compounds accidentally reacted in certain ways and became caught up in loops of chemical replication that grew more and more complicated, and so on. It would still be considered blasphemy if we were to suggest that most of life's evolution happened in a relatively superimposed state, where the 'wavefunction' was still being shaped in ways that reflected wilful intents. Selection through point mutations becomes a thing only when decoherence has progressed to the deeply mineralized stage we witness today. Now the pliable potential is caught up in chemical bureaucracy, so to speak—everything grinds against friction and heat loss. It will be even more insulting if we suggest that the structure of the Solar System itself took shape through the decoherence of a potential flow. Today, scientists have no other choice but to imagine that the Moon was formed through a
cosmic catastrophe—a collision between planetary bodies. Inner investigation, however, suggests that the differentiation happened well before mineralization. It is as if the wavefunction of the Earth-Moon system differentiated (like atomic orbitals), and then, as decoherence progressed, we found a 'greater chance' of finding particles in different spatial regions.
This is only an indication, still clothed in external pictures—it is Maya. Yet, it can stimulate our imagination in novel directions. Imagine that we discover a piece of wrought iron and examine its form, but without having any idea that higher temperatures make it soft. We would then be forced to forge the wildest theories about how that shape came about. And make no mistake, such theories
will be developed. It will be theorized how the metal lattice passed through a series of weathering effects that shed metal particles away, and so on and so forth. As simple as this analogy is, present science is in a similar position when it extrapolates the present mineral stage back and forth—especially when it speculates about abiogenesis. The great difficulty, however, is that what we speak of cannot be approached by just abstractly postulating a new quantum aggregate state of matter and then seeking laws that we can simulate in our sensory-bound imagination or on computers to see whether the results will match the decohered state. Such theories most certainly
can be developed; however, that would represent a great fallacy in human evolution. In fact, it would be even
worse than present intellectual science, which, as long as it follows the patterns of transformations of the decohered sensory phenomena (and doesn't throw itself into extrapolation), is in its
rightful place. However, if we use the same intellect to build an abstract theory of the quantum aggregate state, this would be a real hindrance to evolution because, by spreading our decohered intellectual hoppings into such regions, we unknowingly aim to mineralize (collapse) the spiritual as well.
We see how many moving parts we need to grasp at the same time and find their barycenter. But most importantly, we need to realize that all will remain speculative abstractions unless we strive toward
reality. If we cannot experience this contextual filtering of potential within our own thinking process, as said, trying to inflate an intellectual theory about it is even more harmful than the ordinary physical sciences.
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