Federica wrote: ↑Fri Mar 29, 2024 8:33 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Mar 29, 2024 6:31 pm
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Thanks, I'm sure these characterizations help to make better sense of for example this:
Steiner wrote:As regards its original essence, man's astral body has its origin in the higher world, in the spiritual world proper. Within that sphere it is a being of the same nature as other beings whose activity is exercised in that world. Inasmuch then as the elemental and physical worlds are reflections of the spiritual world, the etheric and physical bodies of man must also be looked upon as reflections of his astral being. But in those bodies forces are working, which originate from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. Now since those beings have a spiritual origin, it is natural that within the region of the etheric and physical bodies themselves there thould be found a kind of human astral essence. And a degree of clairvoyance which merely accepts the pictures of clairvoyant consciousness, without being able rightly to understand their meaning, may easily take the astral admixture in the physical and etheric bodies for the astral body proper. Yet that human astral essence is just that principle of human nature which opposes man's conforming to the laws really suitable for him in the order of the cosmos. Mistakes and confusions are more easily made in this domain because a knowledge of the soul's astral being is at the outset quite impossible for ordinary human consciousness. Even during the first stages of clairvoyant consciousness such knowledge is not yet attainable. The consciousness is attained when man experiences himself in his etheric body. But in this body he beholds the reflected images of his other self, and the higher world to which he belongs. In this way also he beholds the reflected etheric image of his astral body, and at the same time the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings which that body contains.
Yes, and just to be clear, these characterizations are not the primary thing, or even the secondary thing. I try to work on expressing them more phenomenologically but still, to my ear, they sound quite formulaic (rule-based) and theoretical. This can act as a hook for the intellect that seeks to find ever-more correspondences between spiritual scientific concepts and build an elaborate mental picture, but such correspondences are infinite and can lead us further away from the inner experiential essence if we are not vigilant, like the hand drawing itself drawing a hand, etc. So it should only be taken as a loose imaginative symbol for our inner experiential distinctions rather than hard definitions for 'physicality' and such. For my part, I feel that I should work on including more such introductory caveats in such posts.
The basic intuition I was trying to express was as follows. We sense different resistance to our spiritual activity as it flows within the various grooves - the thought groove, the soul groove, the sensory groove - and we try to sense how our thoughts steering along certain grooves seem to be attracted with much more 'gravity' than others, as Cleric put it. We notice how that gravity of the sensory groove, although it isn't intuitively transparent to us like our conceptual groove,
for that very reason allows our spiritual activity to stream through it with much more ease, with less effort. Part of the reason why physical analogies can work so well for spiritual realities, provided they are accompanied with careful reasoning, is exactly that - we can strike a compromise between resting our activity on the gravity of the support, which comes easy, and moving our activity within supersensible grooves, which requires more effort.
I will use this gif again as both an analogy to the principle and an example of it:
We all have plenty of experience with simply letting our spiritual activity flow with sensory events, whether watching a movie or the sunset or the birds flying, listening to others speak, making small talk, or just doing routine activities during the day. Most of our intellectual thinking is also rooted in weaving through sensory-like images that have become routine. It's simply what we do most of the time, even after we have entered on the intuitive thinking path. This resting on the gravity of the sensory support, letting it flow downhill, is so habitual that we take it for granted and therefore fail to notice how our very capacity to remain conscious is vouchsafed by it. We get a glimpse of this reality when we practice concentration and start to become sleepy as soon as we make some progress, as soon as we tune out the sensory distractions and calm some of the reverberating feelings and thoughts. Then our activity loses the ground beneath its feet and its first inclination is to drop into a dream and then a sleep state.
So at the other pole, when we steer our activity back towards its own groove in concentration or study-meditating spiritual science, we can't simply allow it to flow along the path of least resistance. If we do that we only end up asleep, in utter confusion, or with abstract schemas that eventually become more trouble than they are worth for our intuitive orientation. So this is one partial phenomenological angle by which we can understand the receding character of the physical spectrum - the spiritual activity that recedes the most becomes the baseline level of support for our activity such that the latter can remain awake and functional with least amount of effort (we can also differentiate within the sensory groove - it's easier to rest our thoughts on the touch sense than the visual sense, for ex.). That which recedes the least - our present activity itself - requires the most attentive effort to approach and investigate in a lucid way. We become the proverbial dog chasing its own tail, trying to lay hold of activity that is morphing immediately in response to our efforts.
But again, that's precisely because the latter makes the
most intuitive sense to us, it's thinking activity contemplating its transformations within its own groove. It's why the most value for our intuitive orientation comes from doing what feels the most effortful and uncomfortable to our default soul patterns of being. Just because we may have distinguished the grooves and some of their characteristics in our conceptions doesn't mean we have accustomed our inner organism to that experiential diversity, and the latter is what makes the biggest difference in our intuitive orientation. It doesn't require clairvoyance but it does require a certain level of patience and persistence while resisting normal passive thinking habits, the sort of continual experimentation without expectation that Cleric spoke of. If something isn't clicking for us in this respect, it's simply feedback that we need more imaginative experimentation.
As weird as it may sound, looking at a colored object and imagining another color on it, experiencing sensations in thought and then our receding memory images of them, and then really trying to feel out the distinction between the two experiences, is something we normally find quite difficult, like flowing water uphill. We may do it once or twice and then feel like it is all figured out and forget about it. I'm only saying this based on my personal experience. Whenever Cleric points to such examples I am always amazed at how I had never thought of them before when they are so simple, but then I realize that's simply because it would take my activity in a direction orthogonal to the way it normally flows, so naturally it doesn't notice these simple things often if at all. Yet these simple differentiations, when imaginatively sensitized to over time, are exactly what will make the more esoteric characterizations intutively resonant.