AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 12:59 pm
Papanca wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 10:47 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12, 2021 12:09 am
And you should continue to ask yourself why you keep misrepresenting Anthroposophy. Your posts have really become farces. It is like me coming to your place of work and shooting down your proposed engineering designs without knowing a single thing about engineering. How could you possibly know about it if you have not read anything by its founder, Steiner? And if you have read something by him, and want to critique it, you can post an excerpt and make a logical critique. We know that won't happen, though, because it is the hard work of reading and understanding that you guys desperately want to avoid. Anthroposophy says each individual must do that hard work or they will not make any spiritual evolutionary progress, which is basically the opposite of your bolded statement. The very attractive and easy "solution" is to avoid spiritual effort altogether and assume all will be revealed to you upon death, or at least you don't have to worry about what's valid and invalid until after you are dead. It is exactly what the materialist does - they say spiritual reality, if it exists, cannot be discerned while we are alive, and probably we will die and that's it. Think about it... you have taken materialism and simply called it "nondual" and "idealist" to make your view seem less mechanistic and absurd. The underlined part shows you are still failing to take idealism seriously, as you think natural selection of physical stuff over billions of years is what drives human evolution. Every idealist during or after the rise of materialism was aiming to combat its de-spiritualization, de-mythologization, etc. of the world - you are trying to circumvent all of that and regress right back to mechanistic materialism.
I have a question for you Ashvin, and please don't take it as adversarial, i have a great respect for your attempts to expound and share this spiritual science patiently and persistently.
There are so many form of spiritualities out there, and each ask us to exert a tremendous amount of effort and spend a great amount of time to test its fruits, to take buddhism as an example, you have to read an unholy amount of sutras and practice the eightfold path etc before you are even allowed to express your doubts and skepticism, yet both time and energy are limited, there is an opportunity cost (whatever time and energy you dedicate to any form of spirituality can't be dedicated to an other), so it doesn't seem absurd to me to follow some kind of heuristics : Look at people who have practiced the specific form of spirituality, and see the fruits it bore, so to be more specific, who would you recommend as some great follower of Steiner spirituality ? Krishnamurti ? Some other name ? Nobody ?
Papanca,
Thanks for the questions. I don't take any thoughtful comments or questions or critiques as adverserial, only clear and repeated attempts to obfuscate and convince others to dismiss without any logical consideration whatsoever.
I recommend Owen Barfield as a direct follower of Anthroposophy. He is easier to approach for many people to begin with. I also try to show in my essays the major overlaps between of other 20th century thinkers (and Goethe, Hegel, Fichte, Emerson, and Coleridge prior to that) and Steiner's work. These include Jung, Heidegger, Bergson, the American pragmatists, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo (haven't discussed them much yet but plan to), Mircea Eliade, and others I am not thinking of right now. And as Dana mentioned Cleric's essays and posts are great real time examples of the imaginative spiritual science we are speaking of. I am talking here of very significant overlaps which would be uncanny to most people.
They are not at all surprising to the spiritual scientist who understands the nature-function of our Thinking activity and the shared realm of ideal content we all exist in. In fact, anyone who starts from sound premises (which could just be the givens of our perceptual and cognitive experience, although idealism also helps), uses careful reasoning, and a bit of Imagination will come to these same philosophical and spiritual conclusions. To understand that nature of Thinking there is no better resource than Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom) by Steiner. It is not very long and will be very clear if understood as a phenomenology without any prior metaphysical assumptions.
If it doesn't resonate or seems confusing, then we are always happy to answer questions and clarify the arguments. This has been done many times on the forum already which I can link you to. And after that if you still think it is not very profound or useful, then we are not going to try to force feed it to you. That goes against the entire Spirit of Anthroposophy, despite uninformed claims here to contrary.