Saving the materialists

[Stranger]

Let's consider the implicit view again. Individual agents modulate the common spiritual environment. I still don't know your exact position on this, but to me, in such a paradigm, it seems necessary that the more 'real' or 'substantial' phenomena should be those energized by the attentional activity of more beings. To put it bluntly, if all spiritual beings decide to stop paying attention to the Earth and everything related to it, it should simply dissolve as a fading dream image, and the beings will remain in their 'naked' spiritual state.

PS: so now regarding this question: of course, individual agents modulate the common environment which gets reified with their attentional activity. This common environment corresponds to their dominant level of consciousness and the dominant mode of perception. This common environment becomes their habitat where they feel naturally at home and where they continue reincarnating, and at the same time it is a training platform where they can further evolve and develop their consciousness. Higher order creator-beings maintain this environment for them and also evolve and benefit from collecting their life experiences and knowledge and learning from them.

[Cleric]

Good question, Cleric. Of course, the spiritual agents are never entirely "naked", there are always aspects/levels of reality where the structures and memories of their consciousness are formed and abide. There is a hierarchy of these layers (some call them "dimensions"). The higher is the dimension, the more different the perception of reality is as compared to our average human perception. Usually, for each being It spans over multiple levels, depending on the developmental stage of a being, but there is always a "center of gravity" - the most dominant level where most of the structures of individual consciousness reside. This "center of gravity" will naturally determine on which level of consciousness the next residence is going to be after completing a particular life cycle. Those who grew out of human mentality level and shifted their "center of gravity" to some other higher level will naturally not incarnate as humans anymore. But such beings are rather rare, most humans will continue incarnating and evolving with the rest of humanity. This hierarchy of levels is also not a one-dimensional vertical, but rather a manifold with quite complex multi-dimensional structure of realms.

This is all very good and certainly can give a good inner direction to many souls. But in our age we need something more. For example, if I were to take the role of the skeptic I might say: “Very well, but how do we know these things? We have turned every stone, split every atom, stared all the way to the edge of the observable universe, and nothing hints at anything you say.” Of course, many such questions are simply ill-intended, but it needs to be admitted that the healthy rational soul in our age justifiably thirsts for something more than a modern age mythology. You may respond that ancient lore combined with mediumistic (channeled) communications and NDEs, all give indications about such higher-order strata of reality. Yet, we must admit that all these communications ultimately serve to strengthen our faith (which is good) but ultimately, the lived reality of all this remains as if behind a veil that only death can lift.

It is important to recognize these things in the context of humanity’s evolution. In the past, when a soul was told that God created the World in six days, these words could act very differently. Today, when such words enter consciousness, people simply laugh or at best consider that the words are highly symbolic. In both cases, however, the reality behind such words remains vague and remote. The soul of today, with developed intellect, needs to ask further questions, namely “How did God create the World, and how our inner experience fits into all of this?”

It is up to us to recognize that we need to go deeper into reality. If we don’t do that, we’re in danger of something that I can present as an analogy. Consider how children see that men and women become married and start families. Then they play games, girls play with dolls, imagine motherhood, and so on. These are all imaginal plays, kids live in pictures of imagined happenings. As they grow up, for some people it turns out that the pictures they have built about relations between men and women clash with reality. Depending on the situation they may continue waiting for the reality that will match their expectations. In other words, the child needs to realize that the imaginal play was a preparation, yet reality is not simply a 1:1 copy of the play on a different level. The child needs to enter a new life connected with a whole new spectrum of experiences, duties, trials, etc. (Obviously, I use this only for an illustration. There could be perfectly good reasons for not getting married, the point is to recognize our inner motivations and justifications.)

Regarding our overall evolutionary process, we are in a similar situation. The religious life through the ages has given the souls the images of higher existence that is yet to come. Today, these images are grasped in a much more mineralized way by the intellect, who tries to build a more detailed picture of reality by combining them in the way it has become used to do by grasping the contents of the sensory spectrum. And here we meet the difficulty. The more we try to do that, the more we feel that we’re doing nothing but a kind of metaphysics. If we are honest, we’ll need to admit to ourselves that our own concepts of dimensions, realms, creator-beings, etc., remain floating, we only have mental images. The reality that these mental images are images of, remains elusive, mystically felt, but nebulous and volatile.

The trouble is that if we don’t recognize this important moment in time, we begin to avoid reality altogether because we secretly prefer the configuration of our religious and metaphysical images, and we are seeking excuses for why we don’t grasp the concrete reality that we make abstract images of. The simplest excuse is that the conditions here are unfavorable and the reality of our images will be known only after death.

Do you recognize that such a danger indeed exists? Namely, that if we overlook it is time to go deeper into the concrete reality of existence, we are in danger of clinging to our inner imagery of choice. And most importantly, do you recognize that in such a situation, the veil could actually be a pseudo-veil? It could be the wall of mental imagery that we ourselves entangle with simply because we’ve grown comfortable with our sense of being in this environment and we prefer to wait for something else to happen that will make the reality as we imagine it, concrete. Do you sense at least as a theoretical possibility that such a danger could exist, that right in this moment we may be missing an opportunity to penetrate the true, concrete inner reality, only because we have built for ourselves a flat vision of something else that we expect in the future (just like a confused boy may miss the modest soul right next to him, only because he lives in unrealistic images and expectations of the princess that is nowhere to be found in reality)?

[Stranger]

Do you recognize that such a danger indeed exists? Namely, that if we overlook it is time to go deeper into the concrete reality of existence, we are in danger of clinging to our inner imagery of choice. And most importantly, do you recognize that in such a situation, the veil could actually be a pseudo-veil? It could be the wall of mental imagery that we ourselves entangle with simply because we’ve grown comfortable with our sense of being in this environment and we prefer to wait for something else to happen that will make the reality as we imagine it, concrete. Do you sense at least as a theoretical possibility that such a danger could exist, that right in this moment we may be missing an opportunity to penetrate the true, concrete inner reality, only because we have built for ourselves a flat vision of something else that we expect in the future (just like a confused boy may miss the modest soul right next to him, only because he lives in unrealistic images and expectations of the princess that is nowhere to be found in reality)?

Yes, I do recognize this. Spiritual paradigms and practices need to be adopted to the current condition and culture of humanity. Often it is done in a shallow and distortive ways (as we can see happening in many modern cults, neo-advaitic teachings and like).

[Cleric]

Yes, I do recognize this. Spiritual paradigms and practices need to be adopted to the current condition and culture of humanity. Often it is done in a shallow and distortive ways (as we can see happening in many modern cults, neo-advaitic teachings and like).

Alright, Eugene, if you want to talk about something you know where to find us

[Federica]

Speaking of ways to smoothly bridge from an intellectual conception of reality to a holistic conception that extends to the non material: I have recently watched an episode of Unherd’s great journalism, and it has given me an idea to illustrate how the human mental capacity is objectively insufficient to match the requirements of even entirely mundane complex questions. There is possibly no need to start from spiritual considerations in order to realize the mismatch between the complexity of reality and our ability to apprehend it, as part of that reality ourselves. This, at least in principle, could hint to the reasonable existence of more powerful qualities of cognition, more adequate and commensurable to grasp the complexity we live in. This could in turn open to the concrete idea that such higher qualities and magnitudes of cognition can’t merely exist as ghostly concepts, but may constitute the very flesh - the cognitive flesh - of existing higher intelligences.

However, at first, it’s rather only a matter of noticing the factual inadequacy of our intellect in the face of, not even the mysteries of science, but simply the interrelations characterizing our societal organization. Normal observation tells us this happens at cognitive scales that we feel accessible to us, in principle. We all naturally engage in everyday life - in social, political, economic, cultural life - through behaviors. Still, even this accessible, human-scale layer of reality, concomitant with our direct experience of taking action in the world, gives rise to levels of complexity that entirely overwhelm human intellectual capacities. We can take for example the current geopolitical situation of the world. Everyone will recognize that it’s impossible for the human mind to encompass this large-spectrum idea in a fully satisfactory way. It’s impossible to focus on all the aspects at once, all the possible lines of reasoning, the comparisons, the history, the possibilities, the opinions, and so on. There is only so much mind space we can deploy, at any given moment of our reflective efforts.

In the face of this challenge, we can conceptualize two ways ahead. The first is the common one: we select certain conceptual lines of reasoning and go down those ones. We elaborate on our preferred trains of thought, one mental picture after another. It's surely possible to venture off-piste: we may digress along sidelines, conceive unexpected concatenations of mental pictures, but we can’t pay focused attention to all the ramifications, not even to a few of them, holding them together in one mind grasp. Instead, we have to think out one contained area at a time, holding and navigating each limited cluster of mental pictures separately. Then, we transition to another cluster, and then another one. Even the most brilliant minds have to accept that the cognitive flow-rate we can deploy is inadequate to handle the reality it's faced with. It’s like watering a garden with a hose the diameter of a straw.

Though we don’t often think about our minds in these terms, this is indeed the reality of how we tackle complex questions, be them the mysteries of the universe, or our very mundane cultural life. The way we typically deal with these restrictions is to relax the time dimension. We renounce a timely understanding, embrace the slow sequential mode. We water one flower at a time. Though we are used to this nano-pace, merged into it, sometimes we may stingingly feel the painfulness of this under-dimensionality of the human mind. Often, after some field analysis, conducted along our chosen high-resolution lines of thought, we usually find ourselves aspiring to a helicopter view. We feel the need to pull some strings. And we do have some ability to elevate the scale of our consideration, to look at things more synthetically and holistically.

But there's always a trade-off. If we elevate the gaze, then look back down through the helicopter window, we can’t trace the more detailed aspects anymore. We find ourselves unable to trace with continuity the various threads we had initiated at ground level. We can’t pull those strings we were ourselves weaving. Soon enough, we experience a discontinuity of scales. Above a certain elevation, we are forced to lose track of our own freshly traced ideal threads. If we are honest, and stick to direct experience, this process is clear enough. Ultimately, we may still come up with some form of executive summary, according to our initial wishes. We tend to call it “my opinion”, or “my sense”, because, in fact, it is no longer on a continuous path with our initial detail-level considerations.

In other words, everyone hits a certain level of aggregation of mental pictures above which one can no longer operate an encompassing, solid, accurate reasoning, that also remains clear and traceable to the ground level of resolution. In the geopolitical example, we could imagine the level of, say, the national energy policy under a given government, in relation to certain industrial conditions; or, as another example, the immigration strategy and management in certain world region, in the face of a particular event. That far, it may be possible to remain sound, factual, and clear. But when we try to further elevate the view, wishing to gain an encompassing grasp of all the various lines of reasoning beyond and above these two, a threshold is experienced, where we are forced to take a leap. We can’t increase elevation and resolution at the same time. We have to discontinue clear reasoning, and simply reemerge on the other side, the side of conclusions, judgments, and calls to action, really with nothing better than subjective opinions on what should be done, and how. Because of this cognitive leap, we are unable to identify and trace what other elements, beyond the focused analyses developed in controlled sequencing reasoning, may have interfered, and influenced our higher-level judgments and recommendations (such as emotions, facts of our upbringing and life history, religious or metaphysical views, ideologies).

I guess everyone should be able to recognize these human limitations in oneself. Our capacity is under-dimensioned to reality. We would need another scale of cognitive flow-rate, if we were to penetrate with smooth cognition even only our very worldly existence. In our typical management of this condition, we give up the ambition of a fully reliable, objective grasp of totalities - where entire ideas would fit in unitary, clear understanding - in the now - and instead, we accept to proceed step by step. At some point, we end up chancing an overall grasp, but we also realize - if we are honest - that moving pieces may move unbeknown to us, while we are not in control, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The compelling logic of the high-resolution analysis is interrupted, and we have to admit a level of arbitrariness in the new, discontinuous mental pictures we emerge into. It’s either or.

These considerations could perhaps lead to the idea that, since the complexity is there, and since it overwhelms our understanding, there must exist a better approach to apprehend it - a high-level, holistic cognition that also allows to maintain sufficient resolution on all parts. It makes sense that the simple fact that something exists calls for the possibility for it to be properly understood, as a unity, even if this possibility doesn’t seem to lie within the current range of human capacities. Maybe one could even figure that such a cognition must be already deployed in some sense, and that we, as humans, must be missing a relevant part of the story, since even our worldly life is too complex to properly fit in our minds.

In this line of reasoning, higher cognition could perhaps be conceived as the cognitive counterpart of world complexity, that we could attempt to ascend to, by an alternative approach to our capacity issue. Instead of going bottom-up, starting as described with sequential thought, and then having to sacrifice continuity of mental pictures beyond a certain level of aggregation, there could be a top-down alternative. The usual engagement in sequential, high-resolution mental pictures could be resisted, or sacrificed. For example, to understand the botanical realm, we could resist engagement in analytical consideration of individual plants, and also engagement in the collective concepts of groups and sub-groups of plants. These collective concepts are comfortable places for the mind to dwell into, where we feel we have worked around the variety of natural and fictional exemplars of a given group, and moved one step up, by extracting some common essence from multiplicity.

But now we have decided to explore a top-down direction. If we conceive that the unitary grasp may exist - in the same way that mathematical hyperdimensionality exists, as shown by the formulas, though our mind hits a wall when trying to figure it in a continuum - then perhaps it becomes a reasonable endeavor to seek the contextual support of a possible hidden structure of what we could call hyper-concepts, that is, guidelines, layers of influence, contextualities, geodesics,... or however else we decide to call them, which could support our growth into a new understanding that logically matches the complexity of reality. At this point, the entire work would still be ahead. But here the effort was to explore a line of reasoning towards the higher worlds that may sound reasonable to the rational intellect and possibly help save the materialist.

[AshvinP]

This unveils a hidden polarity in this view - the phenomenal screen/space whose qualitative 'pixels' the agents energize, and the pure agents themselves. This raises an interesting question. Let's say an agent has cleared all entanglements with the screen, thus he's not drawn to incarnation again, he's not even entangled with the Solar system, he's a truly free agent. But now we can ask what determines the unique individuality of this naked spiritual agent. The very fact that he's still a well-formed individual agent suggests that there's still some structure (there's something setting apart one agent from another, the least of which is the fact that the agent has a unique memory of his individual journey). If phenomenal space (both physical-sensory and higher) is no longer a factor, then what is it that makes the agent's perspective different from that of other beings? In simple terms, there should be some kind of partitioning that is no longer in phenomenal space since one is no longer entangled with it and is thus free of its influences. So what is this other aspect of reality where the naked individuality is partitioned and where the memory resides?

Good question, Cleric. Of course, the spiritual agents are never entirely "naked", there are always aspects/levels of reality where the structures and memories of their consciousness are formed and abide. There is a hierarchy of these layers (some call them "dimensions"). The higher is the dimension, the more different the perception of reality is as compared to our average human perception. Usually, for each being It spans over multiple levels, depending on the developmental stage of a being, but there is always a "center of gravity" - the most dominant level where most of the structures of individual consciousness reside. This "center of gravity" will naturally determine on which level of consciousness the next residence is going to be after completing a particular life cycle. Those who grew out of human mentality level and shifted their "center of gravity" to some other higher level will naturally not incarnate as humans anymore. But such beings are rather rare, most humans will continue incarnating and evolving with the rest of humanity. This hierarchy of levels is also not a one-dimensional vertical, but rather a manifold with quite complex multi-dimensional structure of realms.

The following lecture is helpful to contemplate, as it speaks directly to the central issue here, as Cleric also pointed to. Why do we feel so comfortable with our configurations of mental pictures about what happens after death and how spiritual evolution unfolds? I think it has been established that none of this is provided out of the X state by itself. It is all philosophized by drawing on various sources that seem to 'make sense' to us, and which more importantly feel sympathetic, while what is shared below out of higher cognitive research will be reduced to simply another philosophy or dismissed as untrustworthy because it feels antipathetic. Why is that? Could it be that what is written below strikes too close to home, puts up a mirror too directly, and so we would rather turn away from it and pretend it doesn't exist? In any case, what is below can only be appreciated concretely when it is understood not as pointing to some hypothetical people with underdeveloped souls who will need to return to the Earthly center of gravity, but to us and our real-time personality configuration that steers our attention and thoughts. What would we do (or not do) to convince ourselves our soul is no longer a dissonant tone within the Cosmic harmony and therefore the karmic lawfulness no longer applies to us in the same way as it does for "most humans"?

***

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA115/En ... 16p01.html

Is that really the only point of view available? It must be admitted that among the advocates of the doctrine of repeated earth lives there are to be found even today those who maintain that the spirit descends from exalted heights into earth life. Such people are really not dealing with matters such as spiritual science is capable of bringing to light out of the spiritual worlds, but merely with general, vague ideas about repeated earth lives. We could ask ourselves, “Might not the condition into which we are born be something beautiful and grand? Might we not recognize that man, as he appears in his physical form, is an image of God in the true Biblical sense?” That would suffice to enkindle our enthusiasm, and then we would admit that man had been transferred, not to a dungeon, but to a beautiful field of action, to a beautiful house.

Does our contentment, our feeling at home, really depend upon the house, upon its beauty and grandeur, or upon the concessions we must make? Does it depend upon the house at all? Possibly its very grandeur and beauty might be oppressive and prison-like for an underdeveloped man, chained to it without knowing what to do with it. He might say, “Yes, the house is beautiful, but it annoys me to be locked up in it.” That is what becomes evident through observation based on spiritual science, observation that ascends by way of imagination, inspiration, and intuition to a genuine cognition of what remains continuous in man throughout his various earth lives.
...
The possibility of attaining to this imagination as one should depends largely upon having previously developed certain psychic attributes, for in connection with this imaginative self-cognition all sorts of illusions arise. Everything in the way of human pride, in fact, every kind of human susceptibility to illusion, lies in ambush. You can see a great variety of things in the imaginative [astral] world. For example, you might mistake something that is really purely a matter of the feelings for yourself. It is a common phenomenon that people hold high opinions of themselves, and a person of this sort, in reflecting on the extraordinary creature he has become, is prone to conclude that he must have been something exalted, royal, or the like—Charlemagne, Napoleon, Marie Antoinette, or the reincarnation of some saint. Because such people tend to consider their individuality so important, the individuality they encounter occupying their body in the sense world, they can only assume that in a previous incarnation they were something exalted. These matters are indeed serious, for they point to the fact that the manner in which a man's own being confronts him imaginatively depends entirely upon his soul.
...
When we have learned to know ourselves imaginatively, we realize that we are by no means as well adapted to this world as we would be if we could make proper use of our entire organism. We discover that what we are, in the light of imaginative cognition, must be opposed by something else in the world. Here we arrive at an interesting dilemma that must impress our souls if we would really learn to know the world. We find that in view of all that surrounds him in the world, man, as he learns to know himself in the imaginative world, cannot possibly consider himself great and mighty. It is not a case of coming from a higher world and being imprisoned in this earth body, but of being not at all adapted to it, not able to make use of it all. For this reason the imaginative world is opposed by another, a world that corrects what man does badly as a result of his inability to use his body. As opposed to what man is in the imaginative world we have the whole cultural evolution of man, from the beginning of the world to the end.

Why is this the case? We understand now that in the course of the cultural evolution of the earth man must become, through many incarnations, what he will be able to be in some one future incarnation, and for this reason he has the longing to keep returning. In each incarnation he must long for what is impossible of achievement in a single earth life. He must keep returning; then he can eventually become what it is possible to be in one incarnation. Precisely by acquiring the knowledge of and feeling for what he really should be in one life, but what he cannot be for inner—not outer—reasons, he knows what feeling must predominate in the soul when he passes through the portal of death. The predominating feeling must be a longing to return, in order to become, in the next life and in subsequent ones, what he could not become in one incarnation. This longing for ever new earth lives must be the most powerful force. These thoughts can only be touched upon, but they yield the strongest confirmation of reincarnation.
...
That is the truth, whether we like it or not. One who is capable of applying the requisite attention to himself will in this way gradually arrive at what may be called inspirational cognition of himself. The path leads through bitter experiences, but finally one seems like an instrument badly out of tune in the harmony of the spheres, causing a discord there. Through this further self-knowledge we realize still more clearly how little we are able to make of this glorious divine nature, whereas we could make so much of it if we were equal to it. If we repeat such an exercise many times, then, toward the end of our lives, but beginning as early as the thirty-fifth year, the peculiar character of the tone compels us to realize how much there is to improve upon what we were in life, and that we should long for reincarnation in order to be able to correct our shortcomings. That is one of the most important results of inspirational cognition. When a man learns to know his own fundamental tone, he discovers how ill adapted he is to external nature, and how little opportunity he has to find peace and inner harmony. Those who boggle at the idea of reincarnation only show how incapable they are of understanding themselves in their inadequacy, how egotistical they are in having no wish to develop further so beautiful a gift of God.
...
Thus we find a deep connection between all that is spread out in nature as spirit deeds manifested in natural laws, and what we discover within ourselves, through inspiration, to be our deeper self. That is why in all esotericism, in all mysticism, the inner peace and harmony of nature's laws are always held up as the ideal for man's inner law. It was by no means fortuitous that in the ancient Persian initiation one who had attained to the sixth stage was called a Sun hero. His inner law and sureness were such that he could no more deviate from the prescribed path than could the sun from its course through the universe. If the sun could depart from its course for one moment, untold revolutionary destruction would inevitably result in the cosmos. There is a further step that we can take on our way to self-comprehension. We could ascend to the grasp of man in intuitive cognition, but that would lead us into such exalted regions that it would be extraordinarily difficult to clarify the matter, or to designate that world that appears externally as the counterpart of intuitive man.

From all this you will see that the human being is, in fact, able to observe all that he has the possibility of being, that is, what he might be in that glorious exterior structure of the world in which he is “imprisoned,” surely not because this exterior structure is bad, but because he falls so far short of measuring up to it. This shows us that the important thing is a right evaluation of all world contexts, a proper understanding of the basis of that sort of spiritual cognition, including the nature of man, that is presented by anthroposophy. Most of the objections commonly raised arise out of principles that completely misjudge world contexts.

[Cleric]

Speaking of ways to smoothly bridge from an intellectual conception of reality to a holistic conception that extends to the non material: I have recently watched an episode of Unheard’s great journalism, and it has given me an idea to illustrate how the human mental capacity is objectively insufficient to match the requirements of even entirely mundane complex questions. There is possibly no need to start from spiritual considerations in order to realize the mismatch between the complexity of reality and our ability to apprehend it, as part of that reality ourselves. This, at least in principle, could hint to the reasonable existence of more powerful qualities of cognition, more adequate and commensurable to grasp the complexity we live in. This could in turn open to the concrete idea that such higher qualities and magnitudes of cognition can’t merely exist as ghostly concepts, but may constitute the very flesh - the cognitive flesh - of existing higher intelligences.

That’s a great treatment, Federica. To complement it, it should be added that the opinionated helicopter-level steering doesn’t result simply from the technical impossibility of encompassing all the details of inner and outer life. The elastic tensions at the higher level have a life of their own (plane of causality). As a matter of fact, evolutionary-wise, these steering tensions came first as the snake prematurely inspired individuality in the proto-humans. Then, the natural variability in these human beings (which is otherwise kept in harmony by a higher group Intelligence) exacerbates these variations as desires for different soul paths of experience, and conflict soon follows.

Imagine there’s an apple tree with one fruit and we both reach for it. Let’s say that for some reason only one can have it. We can try to solve the dilemma, for example, by flipping a coin, but this will still leave one with an unsatisfied desire. Wouldn’t it have been better if things were so arranged that no two souls could desire for the same state of being – something like a soul-level Pauli exclusion principle? As a matter of fact, such a principle is already in place, since everything is entangled, however, because of the premature individuation, these entanglements were pushed and pulled, increasing the extremes toward hedonistic pleasure and pain and suffering. These ripple through humanity’s being. All such frictions are at the same time felt as elimination of possibilities, or decoherence. On a grander scale the whole mineralized experience we have today results from a flow of being that has become frictious and ‘bureaucratic’, needing micro-management at every step.

All of this ties very well with Ashvin’s quote above. If we don’t understand the origin of our mineralized state, we may falsely believe that it is simply a certain floor of experience. It’s like the gods said: “Let’s make here a compartment made of mineral matter and give souls the opportunity to experience a life of dense corporeality.” And if we do not comprehend these things while in the body, they’ll become clear to us very soon after death. Then we understand how ill-adapted we are to life in the soul realm, where we can't at all find our center of gravity, as it is helplessly thrown through the oscillatory patterns of our astral nature. It is only now that we comprehend that the mineral realm exists not because the gods created it as some kind of sandbox but because we continuously decohere the higher life through our conflicting soul tensions. Then we yearn for incarnation because only at that level we have the grip to resist and harmonize the soul oscillations (our relatively stable corporeal life gives us the center of gravity, and makes us feel as the same "I", even though our astral nature oscillates. In the disembodied state our "I"-ness helplessly morphs together with the astral tides.)

And here you are right that we can solve this problem only by taking something from above-downward. We need the understanding that our individual existence is not shaped out of our own center in complete isolation from everything else. This may seem absurd to today’s physical worldview but having a desire or an inclination exists in mathematical relations with all other souls. Our inner states are indeed like communicating vessels – when something changes in me, something changes in everyone else too, and vice versa. Thus the entanglements are already there. We only need higher insight coming from their level, which alone can attune our soul life such that if one wants the apple, another will have the insight to have something else that no one else wants. This is why purely mechanical ideologies, be it capitalism or communism, can never solve the problem. They simply ignore the inner realities of the complete human being and the deeper reasons for conflict and friction. Moral imagination and intuition, as described in PoF, even though not explained through entanglement and communicating vessels, already imply that there’s a fundamental unity, from whence we can draw our impulses. In a more constrained way, this is how a bee or ant colony operates. The individuals are entangled in such a way that they have impulses that generally do not clash with those of the others (although individualization creeps even into these animal levels). In our human case, however, this can no longer happen in an instinctive way. We can only seek the Inspiration of harmoniously correlated impulses (which means having conscious and concentric relations with the higher Minds – the hierarchies) in freedom and full cognitive lucidity.

[Federica]

That’s a great treatment, Federica. To complement it, it should be added that the opinionated helicopter-level steering doesn’t result simply from the technical impossibility of encompassing all the details of inner and outer life. The elastic tensions at the higher level have a life of their own (plane of causality). As a matter of fact, evolutionary-wise, these steering tensions came first as the snake prematurely inspired individuality in the proto-humans. Then, the natural variability in these human beings (which is otherwise kept in harmony by a higher group Intelligence) exacerbates these variations as desires for different soul paths of experience, and conflict soon follows.

Imagine there’s an apple tree with one fruit and we both reach for it. Let’s say that for some reason only one can have it. We can try to solve the dilemma, for example, by flipping a coin, but this will still leave one with an unsatisfied desire. Wouldn’t it have been better if things were so arranged that no two souls could desire for the same state of being – something like a soul-level Pauli exclusion principle? As a matter of fact, such a principle is already in place, since everything is entangled, however, because of the premature individuation, these entanglements were pushed and pulled, increasing the extremes toward hedonistic pleasure and pain and suffering. These ripple through humanity’s being. All such frictions are at the same time felt as elimination of possibilities, or decoherence. On a grander scale the whole mineralized experience we have today results from a flow of being that has become frictious and ‘bureaucratic’, needing micro-management at every step.

All of this ties very well with Ashvin’s quote above. If we don’t understand the origin of our mineralized state, we may falsely believe that it is simply a certain floor of experience. It’s like the gods said: “Let’s make here a compartment made of mineral matter and give souls the opportunity to experience a life of dense corporeality.” And if we do not comprehend these things while in the body, they’ll become clear to us very soon after death. Then we understand how ill-adapted we are to life in the soul realm, where we can't at all find our center of gravity, as it is helplessly thrown through the oscillatory patterns of our astral nature. It is only now that we comprehend that the mineral realm exists not because the gods created it as some kind of sandbox but because we continuously decohere the higher life through our conflicting soul tensions. Then we yearn for incarnation because only at that level we have the grip to resist and harmonize the soul oscillations (our relatively stable corporeal life gives us the center of gravity, and makes us feel as the same "I", even though our astral nature oscillates. In the disembodied state our "I"-ness helplessly morphs together with the astral tides.)

And here you are right that we can solve this problem only by taking something from above-downward. We need the understanding that our individual existence is not shaped out of our own center in complete isolation from everything else. This may seem absurd to today’s physical worldview but having a desire or an inclination exists in mathematical relations with all other souls. Our inner states are indeed like communicating vessels – when something changes in me, something changes in everyone else too, and vice versa. Thus the entanglements are already there. We only need higher insight coming from their level, which alone can attune our soul life such that if one wants the apple, another will have the insight to have something else that no one else wants. This is why purely mechanical ideologies, be it capitalism or communism, can never solve the problem. They simply ignore the inner realities of the complete human being and the deeper reasons for conflict and friction. Moral imagination and intuition, as described in PoF, even though not explained through entanglement and communicating vessels, already imply that there’s a fundamental unity, from whence we can draw our impulses. In a more constrained way, this is how a bee or ant colony operates. The individuals are entangled in such a way that they have impulses that generally do not clash with those of the others (although individualization creeps even into these animal levels). In our human case, however, this can no longer happen in an instinctive way. We can only seek the Inspiration of harmoniously correlated impulses (which means having conscious and concentric relations with the higher Minds – the hierarchies) in freedom and full cognitive lucidity.

Thank you Cleric! That's illuminating. I had some level of vague understanding of all this, but certainly not that the I after death is weak, compared to the soul oscillations. I realize that's key in order to grasp the real power of the elastic pulls after death, as also pointed to in the lecture Ashvin shared. In any case, in the post, I did mean to signal the influence of the elastic tensions in the helicopter-view opinionated steering, beyond the technical underdimensionality of our intellect:

"Because of this cognitive leap, we are unable to identify and trace what other elements, beyond the focused analyses developed in controlled sequencing reasoning, may have interfered, and influenced our higher-level judgments and recommendations (such as emotions, facts of our upbringing and life history, religious or metaphysical views, ideologies)."

[AshvinP]

Then we yearn for incarnation because only at that level we have the grip to resist and harmonize the soul oscillations (our relatively stable corporeal life gives us the center of gravity, and makes us feel as the same "I", even though our astral nature oscillates. In the disembodied state our "I"-ness helplessly morphs together with the astral tides.)

Thanks for this addition, Cleric. Steiner also speaks to this in the lecture:

The accuracy of what I have stated is confirmed by something else as well. We can continue our efforts to reach the spiritual world. In a purely technical way we can achieve perception of the higher world by ignoring external perceptions and devoting ourselves to the life of visualizations. There is a still further possibility of giving a definite turn to meditation and concentration, namely, by endeavoring to let our memories unfold with complete inner faithfulness, with absolute inner conscientiousness. This need only be done for a few hours, but seriously. What is one, really, in life? Well, by means of logic and the theory of knowledge we learn that one is an ego, but in ordinary life one is a very doubtful ego. One is exactly what this ego is filled with at the moment. If you are playing cards, you are exactly what the impressions of the card game provide. Your consciousness is actually filled with the impressions of the card game, or whatever it may be. This is the ego to which consciousness can attain. It is attainable, but it is something highly variable, fluctuating.

It's very interesting if we try to become more sensitive to how our astral-ego nature merges with certain experiences during ordinary life, like working out or playing sports for example. We normally lack this sensitivity precisely because our "I" has the the bodily-sensory support that spans the entire period before, during, and after the experience, so we feel like a stable identity. The impulses, passions, interests, sympathies, etc. that are dragging us around especially in such events are stabilized by the bodily support. Yet there is nothing stopping us from heightening sensitivity to these astral oscillations by living into the experiences more, even if only in memory review after the fact, except our hidden fear of what it may reveal. Then we can already get a sense of what life may be like once the "I" loses the bodily support after death, and hopefully this deeper experiential insight also inspires us to make use of that precious support while we can to resist and torque the soul nature.

[Federica]

It's very interesting if we try to become more sensitive to how our astral-ego nature merges with certain experiences during ordinary life, like working out or playing sports for example. We normally lack this sensitivity precisely because our "I" has the the bodily-sensory support that spans the entire period before, during, and after the experience, so we feel like a stable identity. The impulses, passions, interests, sympathies, etc. that are dragging us around especially in such events are stabilized by the bodily support.

This is a great example for me. With working out, I have lately been trying, as an exercise, to bring to the workout a mood completely different from my usual one. And it's been more difficult than I thought. The intention usually lasts very shortly, and before I know it I'm back to my usual way. Later I may realize that, and reemerge in my intention, but sometimes only too late when I'm back home.

But this is a slightly different exercise from the one you describe, since I try to become more sensitive to the more stable soul influences, rather than the moving ones, dependent on the particular activity. I believe that, on top of the physical body, these more stable features also provide a (false) sense of deep identity, that is probably more challenging to realize, and perhaps even more so the more one gets older, when the risk of becoming too comfortable and merged with certain traits gets higher.