Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Wed Dec 08, 2021 5:31 pm
I see, so you just strip the "elemental" of its subtlety and supposed independent existence, of how it flies out to influence someone it is directed to and then returns to sender, and all the rest of it... in this way, you'd do a super job of dumbing Steiner down to the point where he pretty well ceases to be there.
I expect you'd say he'd need to be introduced gradually....a bit at a time....until someone's ready....
to be taken over!!
Ben, you missed the whole point. It was that if people today can't experience something spiritually real in thinking - in fact, the most spiritually real thing we can ever experience at our stage of development - then it's simply impossible to speak of
anything spiritually real.
Anyway, things are getting emotionally charged here that I don't think anyone really reads what others write. I'm not complaining because I asked this thread to be opened and I was aware how it would go.
What I wrote to Ben wanted to make a simple point. Before we can have meaningful conversation about spiritual things, we must first make sure we know what 'spiritual' refers to. And from what I see, I don't think this is very clear. The general conception is something like "Instead of imagining the world as being made of atoms and vibrating energy, we imagine that it is created of some mystical spiritual stuff". The other thing is that 'spiritual' is almost universally equated with 'religious'. In other words, spiritual things are question of belief. The real world is what we see, spiritual things are only one of the possible explanations of the world, competing with other explanations such as super strings.
We can't make even the tiniest step forwards if we don't recognize that in thinking we deal with something spiritually real. Not religiously real, not something that we believe it's made of energy vibrations but as direct fact of experience in which we are spiritually active. In order to speculate if the world is made of atoms of elementals, if it is a dream or naive reality, we must
think. Thinking
precedes the speculation.
Does this make sense? If we can't settle on this, it will be very difficult to understand anything else.