Federica wrote: ↑Thu Mar 07, 2024 5:14 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Mar 06, 2024 9:57 pm
Don't you get tired of this inner stance of constant suspicion and mistrustfulness, Federica? It is getting to the point where I can't even make a comment to you anymore without some ulterior motives being imputed. Even if that's how you feel inwardly, can't you make some effort to resist bringing it to expression and just engage with the words as written in a non-personal way?
The meaning of my words above are very clear - there is discussion on the channel around the racism topic, it is taken for granted that Steiner's racism is a reality, and such ideological filters can be very problematic. It is further clear that "
I have no idea" whether this filter influences their understanding of Steiner's other works because I haven't listened to the videos. If you can't take the meaning at face value because of whatever antipathy you have for me, then maybe that's something you should own.
And I would add, we would be mistaken if we assume ideologies are simply 'political orientation' that we can choose to wear like clothing - they run much deeper into the soul constellation of temperament, disposition, sympathies, etc. (which your article also highlighted). As Jung said, 'people don't have ideas, ideas have people'. There is especially tremendous pressure these days to fit everything into such narratives. We see it everywhere in spiritual life these days, including
Waldorf Schools. This isn't an antipathy, but simple fact.
Leaving aside the presuppositions about me, and coming to ideologies - yes I also think we would be mistaken if we assume ideologies are simply 'political orientation' that we can choose to wear like clothing (as per the article I recently shared).
I agree with the vast majority of what is pointed out at the link.
Similar issues are occurring worldwide in a variety of social contexts nowadays, and it has become more and more challenging to keep working as usual while respecting one's ideas at the same time, in accordance with Anthroposophy, in accordance with living thinking in general. It can go from pressure to add "pronouns" to one's communication, to much more consequential things. I guess moral dilemmas and difficult choices will only become more and more frequent going forward. I see it very clearly in my own work, and I believe I am far from being the only one.
In any case, it's a rather hot topic and I imagine that few would take the risk to discuss it. But if anyone wants I am all for it. Personally, I still have some hesitations about being entirely transparent in all aspects of life, but I have the ambition to become fearless and prideless, and tackling these types of themes publicly will probably be part of that.
PS. At this exact moment I have been emailed the followjng nudge by Google:
Federica, show your support on International Women’s Day
Support women-owned businesses in more ways
During International Women's Day on March 8th and beyond, Google Maps makes it easier to support women changemakers, business owners, and leaders
See below for inspiration on how to get started.
Contribute now
Yeah, it seems these various group-consciousness movements have become thoroughly intwined with monetary interests. It is a clear sign that people are more hesitant than ever to know themselves as free thinking individuals, to unpeel the layers of group identifications that have been amassed around their spiritual core. Barfield touches on this topic in his essay on 'Why Reincarnation?', as in, why is it more important than ever for people to become conscious, in a concrete experiential way, of their core spirit that clothes itself in psychic and bodily configurations from incarnation to incarnation for definite and transpersonal goals.
Barfield wrote:Take for instance the Women's Liberation movement. Well, there is first of all the rather obvious and crude reflection that the emotions of a woman confronting a male chauvinist pig could hardly help being considerably modified by a firm conviction that the said pig will himself in all probability be born as a woman a little later on in the course of evolution. But I am not thinking of that so much as of the narrow and jaundiced view of the past history of mankind which the movement seems to engender in its more enthusiastic adherents, and of the bitterness that results from it. Historical judgements are one thing; personal bitterness is another. The judgements need not be affected. Women, let us say, have always been the oppressed sex. But the bitterness, the venom in it comes of the speaker identifying herself with her sex as a whole, both now and in the past.
Whereas, if she is aware that, in the core of her being, she is as much masculine as feminine, she is free to identify herself not with an artificial class consisting of all women living and dead (which is after all a numerical abstraction) but with Humanity as a whole; which I would say is a reality and not an abstraction at all; and which is in any case not a divisive concept, like that of sex. I am thinking of course of conviction and not of half-hearted belief in reincarnation.
I have also come across this topic on Discord a few times, which again seems most prevalent among the spiritually or esoterically minded. Here is one comment I posted in response to the 'trans-activist' issue:
***
Yeah, Steiner already laid out the core of this issue in PoF, Ch XIV.
Man, however, makes himself free from what is generic. For the generic features of the human race, when rightly understood, do not restrict man's freedom, and should not artificially be made to do so. A man develops qualities and activities of his own, and the basis for these we can seek only in the man himself. What is generic in him serves only as a medium in which to express his own individual being. He uses as a foundation the characteristics that nature has given him, and to these he gives a form appropriate to his own being. If we seek in the generic laws the reasons for an expression of this being, we seek in vain. We are concerned with something purely individual which can be explained only in terms of itself. If a man has achieved this emancipation from all that is generic, and we are nevertheless determined to explain everything about him in generic terms, then we have no sense for what is individual.
If we think about it, a spirit can only feel offended and victimized by 'gender norms' and biological gender if the spirit
experientially identifies itself with the generic characteristics. It can only feel a burning need to transform its gender if it is ignorant of its own gender-free nature. It's not about what we say in our ideological frameworks, but how the core spirit experiences and knows itself. Even at the most proximate stage of consciousness above the intellect, the spirit knows itself as a masculine-feminine unity. The etheric body of a physical male is female and of a physical female is male. We are already a biological unity, only this fact is veiled by our normal sensory cognition
The whole 'trans activist' movement is an expression of the ongoing evolution of consciousness - etheric realities are being unveiled within consciousness but most people are
unaware this is happening and what their concrete role is in orienting harmoniously with the spiritual evolutionary process. Therefore the spiritual impulse is physicalized and refuge is taken in outer measures that simply manipulate the sensory spectrum. Ironically, these measures only make it more difficult to integrate the etheric counter-pole which makes us a biological unity. The more power we invest in the physical spectrum, the more power it wields over our true "I" and keeps the latter in ignorance.
