Re: Essay: Beyond the Flat M@L
Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2021 7:13 pm
In moral philosophy, the authority problem surrounds the question of how a moral system is enforced. For example, divine judgement is threatened against the wayward while the righteous are promised reward and favor. Is there a carrot or stick associated with the system you propose? I'm guessing "greater harmonization and integration" is the carrot especially when we realize we are but a perspective of this common deep mind.Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Apr 14, 2021 9:09 pm The question of morality is also completely clear in Deep M@L. Morality is not some arbitrary rules decreed by a Divinity for humans to follow. Instead, it's the measure for our spiritual activity and whether it leads to greater harmonization and integration of the Cosmic perspective or the opposite. Since the Cosmos is one and the same thing with our deeper strata of consciousness, while we work on the integration of our perspective we are at the same time working for the moral development of the whole world. Here we shouldn't imagine that we turn away from the outer world and manipulate reality only from the spiritual depths. No - we draw the moral impulses from the spiritual depths and then manifest them through our own activity in the outer world.
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 17, 2021 12:42 pmIn moral philosophy, the authority problem surrounds the question of how a moral system is enforced. For example, divine judgement is threatened against the wayward while the righteous are promised reward and favor. Is there a carrot or stick associated with the system you propose? I'm guessing "greater harmonization and integration" is the carrot especially when we realize we are but a perspective of this common deep mind.Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Apr 14, 2021 9:09 pm The question of morality is also completely clear in Deep M@L. Morality is not some arbitrary rules decreed by a Divinity for humans to follow. Instead, it's the measure for our spiritual activity and whether it leads to greater harmonization and integration of the Cosmic perspective or the opposite. Since the Cosmos is one and the same thing with our deeper strata of consciousness, while we work on the integration of our perspective we are at the same time working for the moral development of the whole world. Here we shouldn't imagine that we turn away from the outer world and manipulate reality only from the spiritual depths. No - we draw the moral impulses from the spiritual depths and then manifest them through our own activity in the outer world.
Also is there any sense of "objective" morals if you are familiar with that argument? If I understand things, Steiner challenges us to be agents who act freely according to our developing moral imagination, not under some fixed timeless set of commandments. Would one understand that new ways of moral action would evolve through the eons?
Ashvin summed it up. I just would like to add another example. Ben recently said:Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 17, 2021 12:42 pm In moral philosophy, the authority problem surrounds the question of how a moral system is enforced. For example, divine judgement is threatened against the wayward while the righteous are promised reward and favor. Is there a carrot or stick associated with the system you propose? I'm guessing "greater harmonization and integration" is the carrot especially when we realize we are but a perspective of this common deep mind.
Also is there any sense of "objective" morals if you are familiar with that argument? If I understand things, Steiner challenges us to be agents who act freely according to our developing moral imagination, not under some fixed timeless set of commandments. Would one understand that new ways of moral action would evolve through the eons?
The problem always seem to stem from the fact that our soul and spirit are considered either non-existent or completely structureless. There's no other reason that one may find what I said about purity and sewage disagreeable. When we speak about the sensory world, the facts force us to take heed. For example, if we water our crops with gasoline, we can't expect good yields. There are things that are compatible or incompatible with proper biological functions. I hope everyone will agree that there's objective difference between a healthy plant and a diseased or dead plant. In an operation room the highest standards of sterility must be met. Is this some arbitrary value system, enforced by the elite? Well, maybe - if we consider the laws of Nature enforced system. The rooms where silicon chips are being manufactured are even more clean than the operation room. A single dust particle may ruin the process. Is the elite artificially introducing clean-room requirements so that they can drive competitors out of the market?Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:33 am The notion that bliss and joy are only available to the elect I find unpleasant (often racism is part of this). A spiritual hierarchy also tends inevitably towards making moral judgements - (Cleric referred to Purity and Sewage for instance).
Thanks Cleric, that was very helpful.Cleric K wrote: ↑Sun Oct 17, 2021 7:16 pmAshvin summed it up. I just would like to add another example. Ben recently said:Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 17, 2021 12:42 pm In moral philosophy, the authority problem surrounds the question of how a moral system is enforced. For example, divine judgement is threatened against the wayward while the righteous are promised reward and favor. Is there a carrot or stick associated with the system you propose? I'm guessing "greater harmonization and integration" is the carrot especially when we realize we are but a perspective of this common deep mind.
Also is there any sense of "objective" morals if you are familiar with that argument? If I understand things, Steiner challenges us to be agents who act freely according to our developing moral imagination, not under some fixed timeless set of commandments. Would one understand that new ways of moral action would evolve through the eons?
The problem always seem to stem from the fact that our soul and spirit are considered either non-existent or completely structureless. There's no other reason that one may find what I said about purity and sewage disagreeable. When we speak about the sensory world, the facts force us to take heed. For example, if we water our crops with gasoline, we can't expect good yields. There are things that are compatible or incompatible with proper biological functions. I hope everyone will agree that there's objective difference between a healthy plant and a diseased or dead plant. In an operation room the highest standards of sterility must be met. Is this some arbitrary value system, enforced by the elite? Well, maybe - if we consider the laws of Nature enforced system. The rooms where silicon chips are being manufactured are even more clean than the operation room. A single dust particle may ruin the process. Is the elite artificially introducing clean-room requirements so that they can drive competitors out of the market?Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:33 am The notion that bliss and joy are only available to the elect I find unpleasant (often racism is part of this). A spiritual hierarchy also tends inevitably towards making moral judgements - (Cleric referred to Purity and Sewage for instance).
So we see that in the physical realm we have completely objective requirements depending on what we want to achieve. The peculiar characteristic of our age is that people simply don't want to conceive that our finer organization also has structure, organs, processes, belonging to corresponding environments.
Just as there are objective criteria for healthy and diseased biological life forms, so there are healthy and pathological soul processes. The soul and spirit realm are not made of some abstract energies that we can manipulate with particle accelerators. They are made of ... well, soul and spirit 'material', in other words - environments out of which our thoughts, feelings, will precipitate. The attunement of the latter is not a matter of some mechanical polishing, a kind of soul plastic surgery we can get in exchange of money. It is what we, individually make of ourselves. As far as we are beings with biological life we partake in the Natural order. But with our soul and spirit we partake in the Moral order of the Cosmos. What the physical laws are for the natural world, so are the moral laws for the soul and spirit world. They are not some rigid laws carved in stone as some commandments. They are the living realms within which our spiritual nature flows. They look like laws of social behavior only from our limited Earthly perspective, because we're still as children that need to be told not to poo into and eat from the same plate - that's how unaware we are of the ways reality works. On high there are living spiritual processes that shape the structure of our evolutionary matrix. When we conduct our thoughts, feelings and will in ways incompatible with these strata of reality, we experience the consequences - pain, suffering, torment, hopelessness, fear, death. These are not arbitrary punishments invented by some harsh God. These are natural things, as it is natural than one will bleed to death if his throat is slit. They are the intrinsic dynamics of worlds that people want to know nothing about. Yet this doesn't excuse them from the consequences, in the same way that fire would not excuse those who didn't know its laws. Fire burns without discrimination and says to man "you'll know better next time". The same words are spoken to us from the spiritual world but people don't yet know better.
Just look around, take a look at the excuse for a civilization that we're all part of. What sounds logical:
1/ The World is essentially mindless matter, so morality is purely human epiphenomenon consisting of emergent patterns of behavior of complex particle systems, aimed at optimizing social performance?
2/ MAL wanted to experience precisely this, so we shouldn't interfere?
3/ God created corrupt World so that he can send brand new souls for one-shot lives on Earth to test their faith?
4/ Reality isn't real so we can simply close our eyes and wait to wake up after death?
5/ We're part of development process and we have very serious holes in our understanding of what man is, what he is made of, how his body, soul and spirit function, how they are structured, what they should be nourished with?
If someone believes that it is elitist to recognize that a world based on lies corresponds to a diseased spiritual organism, breathing and drinking sewage, while a world based on pursuit of truth and the harmony of the facts, corresponds to a healthy vibrant spiritual organism, then I don't really have much to add.
Cleric,Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Apr 14, 2021 9:09 pm ....When we reach this highest point we know that we are still an incomplete being, we don't feel as a stable self there but we are carried on the waves of the idea-beings. As we strive to acquire the unity of our Cosmic perspective, more and more the imperfections in that perspective begin to protrude and as we try to sort them out, they begin to transform into the seed-idea of what is to become our next incarnation, or descent into convolution of consciousness. As we become freer from personal entanglements, we become in position to work for the good of the whole humanity. We can't do otherwise because the layers of humanity are also part of our perspective. We can never reach perfection as long as the Cosmic organism as a whole is imperfect.
As far as the bare intellect is concerned, there's no guarantee of anything except the current experience. The obsession with proofs proceeds from misunderstanding of what intellectual thinking's role is. Instead, thinking should be used as probing tool which reveals more and more of the invisible landscape of meaning within which our state of being metamorphoses.
Meaning is what we live in all the time. It is what we perceive all around us in the world. The perceptual characteristics of the world are about as varied as they can get, but the meaning is what unites them into coherent experiences. Cognitive science has also confirmed that we perceive meaning prior to quantitative perceptual structures. When I have referred to "cosmic meaning", probably I meant intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations. The former are meanings immediately given in perception for modern man, like the meaning of spatial dimension, while the latter are more the archetypal meanings of the sort we discern in mythology, poetry, music, and aesthetics of all sort.
So meaning is not a characteristic or property of the world, but a paradigm/model through which we experience the world. Is freedom then to live without meaning?AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Feb 11, 2022 4:15 amMeaning is what we live in all the time. It is what we perceive all around us in the world. The perceptual characteristics of the world are about as varied as they can get, but the meaning is what unites them into coherent experiences. Cognitive science has also confirmed that we perceive meaning prior to quantitative perceptual structures. When I have referred to "cosmic meaning", probably I meant intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations. The former are meanings immediately given in perception for modern man, like the meaning of spatial dimension, while the latter are more the archetypal meanings of the sort we discern in mythology, poetry, music, and aesthetics of all sort.