The Central Topic

[Cleric K]

You're on the borderline and you equally consider that:
1/ the Cosmos is a dark abyss and lost sparks of thoughts bubble up and coalesce in quasi-stable formations before they sink back into the void
2/ the Cosmos is of Thought-nature, like Goethe's Idea which is inner Light, and our current existence is actually hierarchically filtered Thought-Light. Thus evolution is the experience of the living being, which currently recognizes itself in the filtered light-sparkles (intellectual thoughts), gradually finding its Comic nature within the levels of the Thought-Ocean which thinks the world.

The structure of "2" is what concerns me here. Our present state of conscious evolution means there is a veiled reality to which we can only speculate about without a re-configuring of our soul.

Just to note that this re-configuration starts with something very close to home. Trying to grasp our thinking as a process of soul and spirit reality, is already a very major re-configuration. As a matter of fact, if we make this step, most other things will be seen to fit very naturally.

But my observation of the movement of thought throughout history is that we have moved from a picture of a world governed by a scattered array of spiritual forces, gods, and other entities bustling about, all competing for influence. Rather, the best of philosophy has arrived at classical theism - where the world is ordered by the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. I might be totally misunderstanding things but SS seems to lead to a retrograde movement.

We should be aware that there's always a wide spectrum of beings operating on different levels of integration. The Central Be-ing of the Cosmos has been known always. We can see it even in the most ancient Hindu teachings. Those souls who descended more towards the world of fragmentation began to deal more with the Natural spirits because they were more immediate in their environment. Even for native Americans, who through their shamanic practices came into contact primarily with the spirits of Nature, we can still see the general feeling for the Great Spirit. It was felt that there's an unifying life force flowing through all.

If anything, it is precisely SS which brings back the importance of plurality. The monotheistic feeling has its proper place. It can be said that it serves as a focal point for the development of the human "I". Without it, man would always feel the tendency to dissipate in the Great Spirit. He would seek the unity but would try to approach it only by dissolving in nebulousness. On the other hand, the idea of a Center brings forth the possibility that we find the concentric relation of microcosm and macrocosm.

Yet, simply focusing on a singular concept in the mind doesn't really equate to approaching the macrocosmic perspective of being. This is where monotheism becomes degenerative (when it becomes reduced to one grand concept in the intellect). So now, once we have our stable Center, which is a manifestation of the Cosmic Center, we can begin finding the musical lawfulness of plurality. But this time not by dissolving merrily in it but by attaining to the meaningful unities which lie behind it.

As an analogy we can take language. If we hear words (let this represent spirits) and we vaguely feel that there's underlying unity of meaning (the Great Spirit) yet we don't understand the language, it's like listening to a favorite song in an unknown language. We dissolve in it, we vibrate together with the sounds, we're one with them but there's no meaning (this is where mysticism and psychedelics lead). To move from this kind of unity (which is really only smeared out plurality) to unity of Cosmic speech, it is not enough to simply form an abstract concept of the One and bow to it. We can only do that if we re-configure our soul such that we merge not merely with the sounds but with the meaning of the words. And not only to the meaning as such but to the fact that this meaning is coherent expression of spiritual activity when seen from the proper center, just like our own thoughts are generally coherent expression of our "I"-being (that is, the successions of thought-forms are organized by the unity of meaning that we experience).

And here's really the big objection. People (including in this forum) say that there are islands of meaning (souls) but there's no overarching perspective which can grasp all the isolated perspectives as words that have even higher order unified meaning.

I can not formally prove that this overarching spirit exists but we can easily reckon that we never find an obstacle on our path towards it which is not self-imposed. In other words, to reject this spirit in a rigorous way, we should stumble upon an obstacle that basically tells us "Here, we reached a stage of plurality for which no further overarching unity can be found." And people actually claim this. Eugene for example says that fundamentally there are 'interest soul group' which have fundamentally incompatible nature.

But if we think this more thoroughly we'll see that it conflicts with the most basic nature of our "I". Contrary to what many believe, the true essence of our "I" is not to separate. It is precisely that in our "I" we can find the unity of the separate beings. We can't find that unity only if we postulate fundamentally and ontologically separate bubbles of consciousness for each being (or groups of beings). But the most beautiful characteristic of our "I" is that we can always enlarge the radius of our interests and accommodate with living understanding the viewpoints of other beings too.

Imagine that I confront another person and we're in conflict. I say "we're fundamentally different soul beings. There's no point of contact between us. Each one of us is completely incapable of comprehending the viewpoint of the other. It's like our souls are built of cognitively orthogonal substances. It's like my soul operates with square-shaped phenomena, while yours with triangle-shaped. The most we can know about each other is that we live in orthogonal inner universes and I will never understand what is it like to be you, neither you'll understand what is it to be me. Thus if we're lucky we'll just exist side by side as members of incompatible spiritual species or we'll enter into conflict which is in principle unresolvable because there's no common ground between us."

For anyone who has at least some feeling for what it means to be human in the true sense of the word, the above doesn't stand to the facts. Actually it is the most human characteristic of our "I" that we can always enlarge our horizon. It goes against the millennia-long quest for comprehending the riddle of existence. Look at all the sciences, the arts, religions - all activity of the human spirit. The latter doesn't know limits, it keeps breaking wall after wall. Imagine a scientist saying: "I see stones, I see metals but there's nothing in common between them. I'll stop my scientific investigations right now because there's nothing, even in principle, that can bring connection between them." Luckily, scientists didn't stop there and, even though in a limited and materialistic way, they found that both stones and metals speak the same 'atomic language' on a deeper level.

Yet people today try to do exactly the opposite when it comes to spiritual reality. They say "different human groups exist in fundamentally orthogonal soul-languages. I'll never ever be able to understand within my soul, the thoughts, feelings and actions of those members of the other group."

When formulated like that it doesn't sound quite like something which the human spirit would say, does it? Actually, the above should be felt as insulting. It's like saying "you'll can never find common ground between rocks and metals". As a matter of fact, a scientist may feel motivated to find that common ground just for the sake of refusing to be limited in such an arbitrary way.

If we look at things in this way, we'll soon see that objections like the above are actually nothing but excuses which try to support certain personal, tribal, national, racial, religious, etc. feelings. It is not that we have any solid evidence that different soul groups live in orthogonal and incompatible to each other inner spaces. It's simply that we resist the widening of the soul radius, which can only be achieved through Love.

These are things at the base of all those talks about fundamentally incompatible interest soul groups. It goes against all logic of monism/non-duality to propose such a thing. Instead, we can always expect that there's a greater level of understanding consciousness from which the apparently conflicting groups, still speak the same primordial language in their innermost Spirit.

This is the positive (and not retrograde) aspect of monotheism. It's not in the least about singling out a deity and making the whole world worship it. It's about whether we can find the Being in us which has such Love that it can live in full comprehension of the thoughts, feelings and actions of the beings that we encounter within our ever expanding horizon of experience. The question is not whether there's a monotheistic God or not but whether we can approach within ourselves the primordial creative grounds, which speak the same 'language' no matter the nation, species, planet, galaxy. The scientist assumes that there's something common between our planet and another in a galaxy far, far away - it's assumed they share the same physical laws. The molecular composition of a planet might be different but the more we go towards the foundations, the more unified it becomes (it's assumed that the electron here is the same as the electron there). The physical structure is like hierarchical diversification from common physical ground (unified quantum fields, particles, atoms, molecules, macromolecules, cells, organs, etc.). Similarly, we can conceive that this is the perceptual symbol-image of the spiritual hierarchy of the universal spirit exploring different states of being, yet all overarched through the same universal ground state.

[AshvinP]

Anthony, I think you have a deep trauma from your evangelic years I guess you're currently worried that going into SS may turn into just another version of this:

Indeed there is great trauma departing from evangelicalism. There are many podcasts and ministries devoted to helping people who often suffer significant psychological scarring from leaving the fold.

You're on the borderline and you equally consider that:
1/ the Cosmos is a dark abyss and lost sparks of thoughts bubble up and coalesce in quasi-stable formations before they sink back into the void
2/ the Cosmos is of Thought-nature, like Goethe's Idea which is inner Light, and our current existence is actually hierarchically filtered Thought-Light. Thus evolution is the experience of the living being, which currently recognizes itself in the filtered light-sparkles (intellectual thoughts), gradually finding its Comic nature within the levels of the Thought-Ocean which thinks the world.

The structure of "2" is what concerns me here. Our present state of conscious evolution means there is a veiled reality to which we can only speculate about without a re-configuring of our soul. But my observation of the movement of thought throughout history is that we have moved from a picture of a world governed by a scattered array of spiritual forces, gods, and other entities bustling about, all competing for influence. Rather, the best of philosophy has arrived at classical theism - where the world is ordered by the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. I might be totally misunderstanding things but SS seems to lead to a retrograde movement.

But the real question is not which is right and which is wrong but whether we at all want to see ourselves walking. Because once we walk we'll experience freedom as never before but then we'll be treated as healthy person and we'll have to begin to work.

Is this not akin to the hope offered by offered by numerous oddball belief systems, e.g. Scientology?

Anthony,

Let me just offer a few observations before Cleric responds (*I see now he responded while I was writing, so feel free to ignore them or set them aside for now). If I am not mistaken, your careful reasoning has so far led you to the following:

1) Philosophical dualism is invalid (which is 'classical' theism, or at least must be presupposed to retain such theism in light of modern science).

2) Idealist metaphysics best accounts for general experience of the world and reconciles subject with object.

3) Under #2, conceptual systems are reflections of how consciousness (ideational activity) has evolved, i.e. they reflect some aspect of the so-called 'veiled' reality.
- I have not seen you object to the well-documented theory of evolution of consciousness or this understanding of conceptual systems as perceptual reflections. The main difference being the conceptual forms point more directly to what ideal forces they are reflecting than a "tree" percept points to what ideal forces it is reflecting.

4) There is no actual 'veil' which separates humanity from the ideal forces, any more than there is an actual barrier which separates water vapor or liquid water from their precipitations into freezing rain or snow. There is simply a living flow of ideal activity which condenses, decoheres, etc. into more rigid and seemingly isolated structures, which the intellect then perceives from the 'ground-level'. The living flow has become supersensible for the intellect. Every snowflake is unique yet also is a fractal image of its Origin.
- I have not seen any objections to this either.

5) There is a depth structure to these ideal forces which must be nested heirarchy of interrelated ideational activity, to account for the depth structure we also perceive from the 'ground-level' perspective, i.e. various kingdoms of life and mineral world, the planetary and stellar spheres, and all that modern science has quantitatively specified related to these domains.

6) You are admittedly worried that #1-5 leads you towards something which you consider "oddball" and perhaps some sort of tyrannical religious worldview.

Is this a fair summary of the main points? If so, what exactly is the reasoning behind #6, other than "it sounds like other oddball worldviews to me"? In other words, why do you refuse to livingly experience #1-5 based on #6, which, as far as I can tell, Cleric aptly called a choice to remain disabled because getting up and walking puts us on a more difficult journey filled with responsibility and accountability to ourselves each time we fall down along the way?

[Anthony66]

Thanks Cleric. I found the following quite helpful:

As an analogy we can take language. If we hear words (let this represent spirits) and we vaguely feel that there's underlying unity of meaning (the Great Spirit) yet we don't understand the language, it's like listening to a favorite song in an unknown language. We dissolve in it, we vibrate together with the sounds, we're one with them but there's no meaning (this is where mysticism and psychedelics lead). To move from this kind of unity (which is really only smeared out plurality) to unity of Cosmic speech, it is not enough to simply form an abstract concept of the One and bow to it. We can only do that if we re-configure our soul such that we merge not merely with the sounds but with the meaning of the words. And not only to the meaning as such but to the fact that this meaning is coherent expression of spiritual activity when seen from the proper center, just like our own thoughts are generally coherent expression of our "I"-being (that is, the successions of thought-forms are organized by the unity of meaning that we experience).

When we have recorded Jesus praying to his Father, how do you understand that? Is he directing his attention to the "Center", to a specific higher being, or to a generally to the higher world?

[Anthony66]

Is this a fair summary of the main points? If so, what exactly is the reasoning behind #6, other than "it sounds like other oddball worldviews to me"? In other words, why do you refuse to livingly experience #1-5 based on #6, which, as far as I can tell, Cleric aptly called a choice to remain disabled because getting up and walking puts us on a more difficult journey filled with responsibility and accountability to ourselves each time we fall down along the way?

I was directing my comment at what appeared to be an appeal to pragmatism by Cleric in determining one's worldview. There are many "paths" which at least on the surface confer benefits to the adherent. But this metric can't be used in isolation.

I'm generally on board with SS but I have many questions and lack experiential confirmation. Like many others who have commented here, I'm still wary of some of what Steiner said and wrote and in his latter years but I hope I can better evaluate that with increased understanding.

[AshvinP]

Is this a fair summary of the main points? If so, what exactly is the reasoning behind #6, other than "it sounds like other oddball worldviews to me"? In other words, why do you refuse to livingly experience #1-5 based on #6, which, as far as I can tell, Cleric aptly called a choice to remain disabled because getting up and walking puts us on a more difficult journey filled with responsibility and accountability to ourselves each time we fall down along the way?

I was directing my comment at what appeared to be an appeal to pragmatism by Cleric in determining one's worldview. There are many "paths" which at least on the surface confer benefits to the adherent. But this metric can't be used in isolation.

I'm generally on board with SS but I have many questions and lack experiential confirmation. Like many others who have commented here, I'm still wary of some of what Steiner said and wrote and in his latter years but I hope I can better evaluate that with increased understanding.

Anthony,

I really appreciate that you are sticking with it and keeping an open mind, which itself is a major step beyond what most people are willing to do these days.

My sense was that Cleric was speaking less to personal benefits and more to the existential meaning underlying the spiritual outlook, which is sensed when reasoning through it. That meaning is certainly a personal benefit, but also much more than that - it has an aura of highest ideals of human existence and creative activity. Generally, I think we need ask, "am I often rationalizing myself away from getting on the experiential path of Spirit?", and be very honest with ourselves when the question is answered through intuition and reasoning.

For some time, I was rationalizing away from this experiential path. Some of it was justified - I wanted to build a strong conceptual foundation. But some was simply vague fear, hesitance, apathy, lack of inner motivation, egoic pride and similar unexamined desires and emotions. To some extent, I think that I was using the essays written here as a means of avoidance. That is when I switched to short essays for awhile and focused much more on meditative practice and prayerful soul mood. I looked more towards the heart than the head dimension of spiritual activity.

I can't speak to any experiences too concrete at this early stage - I don't think it is very wise or helpful. But I can say that I have attained inner results that I really had no appreciation of even when I was studying and writing here about philosophy of Thinking and basic spiritual science. I discovered a reality to my spiritual activity I was unable to imagine even 6 months ago. Things are unfolding exactly as conveyed by Steiner and Cleric in various writings about basic Imaginative cognition. That is not to say its some mechanical process which is the same for everyone, but the inner experiences carry exactly the sort of feelings and impressions they have conveyed.

That is only to say, the difference between horizontal and vertical, between theorizing about spiritual activity and experiencing its reality immanently in its living flow, is as real as it could possibly be. Now I know that when Christ says, "the Spirit has life in itself... my words to you are Spirit", and when Steiner points to how mineral forces on Earth always lead to decay of the body (before and after death), so there must be higher forces keeping it intact during life on Earth, they are speaking of something real, something supra-real, and verifiable in our experience. I am often brought to tears just contemplating this grace bestowed upon me and in what ways I can continue to grow it and employ it for transpersonal spiritual aims moving forward.

I still have intellectual questions about SS - there are many conceptual things that bug me that I am unsure of, things that don't quite fit. But now I know the reason for these discrepancies lie within my own soul organization and mininally developed spirit at any given time. It is also a limitation of the concepts which must be used as a medium for communicating higher realities. We have heard several times about racial biases of Steiner here, for ex. How only "white skin" can embrace the Christ impulse. This is based on a misunderstanding of spiritual science, but, more importantly, the purely abstract criticism dissolves into nothingness when a non-white person such as myself can sense Christ within and experience what I have referred to above.

I think it's clear there is no cultic activity involved here, no brainwashing. Neither Cleric nor myself belong to any Anthroposophical group. I have never made donations to anyone and obviously am not asking for any. We don't write books and try to sell them, we don't have youtube channels to gather subscribers, or anything similar. We hold ourselves to standards of only using the most rigorous logic and reasoning. Expressing these realities here is itself the reward, since it is also an expression of our innermost creative and ethical spiritual activity.

[Cleric K]

When we have recorded Jesus praying to his Father, how do you understand that? Is he directing his attention to the "Center", to a specific higher being, or to a generally to the higher world?

These are really the questions that can become fruitful points of departure for great advances. Let this be clear for others too - the importance of Anthony's question is that it seeks something which we can only understand in a real sense when we ourselves try to replicate the state of being of Jesus.

These are questions that can't be answered in satisfactory manner in few words. Actually, they can be answered but the words become meaningful only after we've been growing with the question for a long time. This is very sensitive topic because it requires us to question our own level of development. People today ask existential questions in the manner they ask about the color of a car of a friend: "No big words, please - just tell me - blue or red?" But notice that questions that are asked in such ways already presuppose a lot of things that are already known - we know what car is, we know what red and blue are. In other words, most of the information we receive every day is just reconfiguration of things already known. This approach can never lead to results when we try to gain insight into reality. This secretly implies that we already know all the elements and we just miss some trivial details about their arrangement. When we come to deeper knowledge, we need to develop the humility to realize calmly that there are things that will only become clear through a gradual process. This is obvious in all aspects of life. No one expects that by knowing only the numbers up to ten would suddenly understand the whole of calculus. Yet because of deeper reasons, we do exactly the opposite regarding spiritual knowledge. Usually people ask "Tell me about God - is he red or blue?" But the person rarely asks if his concepts are at all applicable to the question.

In this sense, important questions as the above can only be gradually grown with. Ashvin very well remarked how progress began to be felt once the process became much more practical. Building intellectual scaffold is a necessary beginning but it can be filled with the flesh of reality only when we begin to explore, refine and focus also the wider palette of spiritual activity.

So answering the question with just few words will never be satisfactory unless we're willing to take the words as seeds to be grown. Let's draw another metaphor. We know that as the radius of an arc increases, necessarily the curve will look more and more straight:



In geometry it can be said that a straight line is really an arc whose center is infinitely far away. Let's imagine that our thoughts are like small line segments (or small patches of a sphere). The ideal of the mystic is to experience these patches as completely flat surfaces. This means that if we draw their radiuses they'll be parallel, there's really no center. That's why he says that there's no thinker, no doer - there's only a sea of flat patches whose center of curvature is infinitely far away (or simply put - there's no center).

Yet when we think consciously (meditatively) and try to experience livingly the flow of thoughts (or the movement of the light dot), in our metaphor it can be said that these thoughts are curved patches. If we follow their radiuses it will be found that they all intersect in our "I". Of course this is not something that we can perceive from the side. Yet there's a special intuition within the thoughts which relates them to one and the same being - ours.

Large part of our inner world (which includes the sensory perceptions) stand as more or less flat patches. To speak of God the Father, means that we realize there's curvature to our inner world content. Note that even very pious persons don't at all conceive of things in this way. Instead they imagine some being which created out of itself the world and the souls. Yet we imagine that in a way not too different to the way we imagine the Big Bang. We're still in the domain of spatial idolatry. What we speak of here requires fundamentally different way of cognizing things. We don't fantasize some divine being responsible for the world but instead realize that everything other than thought that we experience - color, sound, feelings, etc. - is also of thought-nature, except that we don't grasp them from the center of curvature from which they are seen as such. Of all the inner spectrum only our thoughts (which most of the time are sounds/words) have to them this sense of curvature which gives us the intuition of our existence as thinking beings.

Now imagine how much of this inner world is taken for granted today. Our preferences, likes, dislikes, talents, etc. are something with which we identify but we can't at all say that we're freely creating them. Instead they act as the riverbed for our spirit. Let's say I'm very jealous. At some level I may not even be very aware of this fact. My behavior and thoughts are still fully ruled by it but I don't see it as element of reality which can be creatively shaped. In our metaphor, this would correspond to quite flat patches of the inner world. Please note that identifying with that feeling is not finding the center! Saying the words "I'm a jealous person" doesn't at all capture what we're talking about. This is merely a statement for a situation we've found ourselves in. The feeling of jealously begins to attain curvature pointing at our "I" when we find the degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity through which we can modify it. Now there's really something in this process which points at our "I" - all our efforts to transform jealousy point at it.

The reasons for jealousy or any other soul characteristic are not easy to know. We can transform them but the centers which explain them are much deeper. Another such part of reality to which we only vaguely know the center, is that of our conscience. Sometimes what conscience tells us can be very different from what we desire at the more surface level of the intellect. So there's a being in us, which sees the same perceptions as we do but senses much more of their curvature, thus deeper relations are discerned. Some of the meaning of these relations precipitate in our surface consciousness as conscience.

If we meditate deeply on these things a lot can be accomplished. The vertical axis of which we often speak really passes through the center of our local curvature of thinking (the waking ego) but there are also phenomena in our consciousness whose curvature we don't recognize as pointing to a coherent center. Glimpses of such deeper center we grasp when occasionally we discern the voice of conscience. It's like thoughts emerge in us which we wouldn't readily say are the product of our fully conscious thinking, yet we intuitively feel that a deeper stratum of our being speaks, a being which potentially grasps more of the curvature of reality.

Very loosely, we can say that the voice of perfected personal conscience is what traditionally is called Holy Spirit. If we imagine further an even deeper level of conscience, one which has in mind the evolution of the whole Solar organism, we arrive at the Son or Christ principle. Still further, a level of conscience which has in mind the whole Cosmic evolution - the Father principle.

Higher cognition consists in precisely the transformation of our organism such that glimpses can be attained from these concentric deeper level of being. Now we see that to answer the original question it is not enough to speak of spatial relations. Where's our conscience? Is it at our center? The periphery? Everywhere at once? We have to think differently about these things. We can't pinpoint our waking "I" as some point in space, what's left for our conscience and even deeper - the Father principle?

So the spatial metaphors are only illustrative. We need to approach the essentials. And the essential in this case is that Jesus had sheaths of being so perfected that the Christ principle could express through them. In ordinary people these sheaths are disorganized, foggy, soaked in desires. Just think how some people rarely hear the voice of conscience, not to mention following it. In Jesus all traces of personal desires were purified, thus the Macrocosmic Christ being could act as an "I" through the body. Yet even the Christ being knows of its relative existence. The conscience of the Christ is the Father, so to speak. The Christ is the center from which all evolution of Life is Cosmically Inspired. When through higher development we reach that point, we glimpse at the level of being which actually Thinks and sustains the living fabric of reality. It's important to understand that this Cosmic process lives on the same side of consciousness as our waking "I". If it helps, we can imagine that the waking ego grasps only an aperture of the same inner world as the one beheld by the higher principles. The difference is that we have idolized the flat perceptions and fantasize explanations for them on the other side of our consciousness - laws of nature, external God, etc. But when our subtle organs are developed we begin to realize that we always live at the same (and only) side of reality - both while in the body and also after death. From the Father's perspective, the inner Cosmos is 'made of' smell, tone, color, feeling and so on. This is experienced from the same side as our waking ego experiences them. The difference is that in our Earthly consciousness all the Cosmic tone, color, etc., have 'contracted' into fractally complicated relative dynamics.

In this sense, to understand where Christ-Jesus pointed his attention in prayer, we must start from what's closer to our own experience. We need to meditate on the question "If I want to be more conductive to my conscience, to whence do I point my attention? Is it in front, in the back, center, periphery?" We can indeed use spatial relations but they must be understood qualitatively. I often use the expression that we need to open up for the spiritual reality behind the back of our face (as in the Deep MAL picture). Hopefully, the connection with conscience here presented, makes it more clear what this 'behind' means.

A Christian, in the true sense of the word, is someone who has realized this esoteric reality of consciousness - that our waking self is only the surface of a gradient of conscience. Ashvin has often quoted Barfield's words that one can be Christian even without having heard of the gospels. And if all here is properly understood we can see why this is so. It's about asking ourselves "So I have a level of being within, which lives in the greater curvature of world destiny. Occasionally the insights of this level of being precipitate in my waking consciousness. But what if this level of being is not strictly personal to my body? What if there are even deeper layers of conscience which are progressively Macrocosmic in Nature and are responsible for the structure of the dream of reality?"

The stumbling stone for humanity today (and where, for example, noble endeavors as BK's ultimately degenerate into mysticism) is that for the secular intellect it is inconceivable how the personal mind and its conscience switch from being strictly personal to being Cosmic - that is, one for many. Basically we take our ego and want to carry it up the vertical axis. One 'solution' is the pathological solipsism, which simply imagines that our human personality is one and the same with the Macrocosmic perspective. Another 'solution' recognizes the dangers of such ideas and instead simply drops out the deeper levels completely. Thus there are only two levels - well-formed many ego-bubbles and singular but completely inexplicable 'pure awareness'.

This problem is solved when we stop preoccupying with the atomicity of the ego. This atomicity is not defined by the singularity of the "I". It's defined by the specific bodily and soul environment which surrounds the One "I". These are cardinal questions and I won't pretend that few sentences can throw enough light on them but let's just say that we make progress when we stop trying to carry our Earthly personality upwards but instead we try to open up for the interests and perspective of the higher levels of being. When our interests span only within the immediate sensory perceptions, we live materialistic life (even if we have idealistic philosophy). When we begin to realize that through our conscience a deeper soul level expresses, we can easily realize that this level of being has quite different perspective and goals. For example, it does not identify with a particular bodily complex. From that level it can see itself in the many incarnational forms, as a man or woman, from various nations, etc. This is still a level of being which is somewhat relatable to those spiritually inclined. It seems that it is tightly related to our Earthly self (that's why in SS it is called Spirit-Self or Manas). Yet we should also be clear that from that level we're also many different persons. From the viewpoint of our current personality, that from another incarnation may look completely foreign, like completely different person (and that's part of the secret reason we don't readily remember other incarnations - most of them are too dissimilar from what we have now). Yet the Spirit-Self is the level of being which lives in soul-space and can recognize it's essential "I"-ness within the persons of the different embodiments. It's like it can say "although as an waking ego within each of these embodiments I felt as completely different person, there was still a part which has overarching existence, interests and goals, in many cases, quite out-of-phase with the interests of the particular embodied personality. This overarching part of me speaks as conscience in the Earthly consciousness."

It is a great illusion if we imagine in the New Agey way that when we die we simply say "Well, that was a fun ride! Now let's pick the next rollercoaster". This completely presupposed that our current feeling for self will remain fully intact after death. But this is not so. Actually, we feel as a self after death only as far as we've developed the feeling for this overarching being while on Earth. It would be much more appropriate to imagine that the Spirt-Self is being built gradually and that the various embodiments in fact develop different organs of it. Imagine that in one incarnation you're a liver, in another you're heart, brain, etc. Gradually, as these organs become integrated, a completely new level of consciousness beings to recognize its life in the organs. Note that in this analogy, the life of the organs may be very different from that of the "I" which will later use all the organs. This "I" would have been felt as conscience speaking to the individual organs.

We're at a stage today where it becomes of vital importance that such things are understood. Only when we widen our interests beyond the window between birth and death, we can begin to bridge the Earthly consciousness with that of the Spirit-Self. In a similar sense, we can realize also that just as our incarnations are the organs of a higher being, so that being and many others are organs of a still higher being which historically has been known as the Christ. The important thing to notice is that at each level, we're not simply translating our Earthly ego consciousness but seek another being which has specific consciousness and creative goals. It's the peculiarity of our evolutionary scenario that there's such disconnect between our Earthly consciousness and the higher. The higher strata are much more musically attuned.

People today are very fond of the 'reality-as-a-dream' metaphor but quickly stop reasoning when they have to explain what determines the Cosmic structure of the dream, the kingdoms of nature, etc. This is all related to the curvature of dream phenomena. In our bodily state we care to buy the new iPhone within the dream. The Spirit-Self is the being which knows that the different incarnational dreams are only its organs, which allow it to awaken to a higher level of lucidity. If we are to awaken to our Spirit-Self in this moment, we would attain to clear consciousness of the world of destiny (karma). At our Earthly dream perspective we engineer what to eat, what to wear and so on. These are the phenomena whose curvature points at our "I". If we gain lucidity to the Spirit-Self level, a lot more dream phenomena will be felt as curved and pointing to various centers. Our whole current Earthly destiny will be felt as a completely lawful engineering of the dream flow. These flows are engineered in such a way that gradually the Earthly dream "I" can in fact begin to lucidly awaken to the overarching flow.

But things go even deeper. If we are to gain lucidity at the level of the Spirit-Life (Buddhi), even more of the dream contents will become meaningful. The whole evolution of humanity will be seen as lawful engineering of the dream flow. The individual incarnations develop the organs of the Spirit-Self, while the evolutionary epochs of humanity as a whole develop organs of consciousness of the Sun-level of being. The Father level of being engineers the dream flow at even higher order but to speak of that we need to enter the details of SS.

So all this is nothing other that what was already written in the Deep MAL essay, we're just approaching it from another angle. Hopefully it gives some hint for the original question. All this is not really meant to give some templated answer but to give a direction for further investigation. The question about Jesus is really about us because it is we who must solve this riddle and understand how to relate to the levels of being which from our ordinary consciousness can be seen as levels of conscience. This is where the question of prayer comes in again: what is the healthy attitude of the "I" dreaming in a bodily complex, to the levels of being which engineer the inter-incarnational dream flow, the flow of humanity's evolution and the whole Cosmic landscape?

(I apologize for any mistakes in the text - I'm finishing this in half-asleep state and don't have the energy to read it once more)

[Anthony66]

Thanks Cleric for such an expansive response to my question. At some level, I get what you are trying to communicate. The big challenge here is to take the spatial metaphor and translate it into experiential knowledge.

The apologist/theologian will often appeal to the various "proofs" of God. For example, the various cosmological arguments will trace a serious of events back to a first cause. This is all well and good but the determined skeptic can always point to various problems with this approach. Likewise, I'm sure a skeptic would have a field day with the various metaphors you employ. Would you say they serve more of a launching pad for personal inquiry as opposed to an apologetic for higher worlds?

I was struck by the following two points:

To speak of God the Father, means that we realize there's curvature to our inner world content. Note that even very pious persons don't at all conceive of things in this way. Instead they imagine some being which created out of itself the world and the souls. Yet we imagine that in a way not too different to the way we imagine the Big Bang.

A Christian, in the true sense of the word, is someone who has realized this esoteric reality of consciousness - that our waking self is only the surface of a gradient of conscience.

These are radically different to the way a Christian off the street would conceive things or how things have been framed in the centuries of theological rumination. Does that concern you at all?

What is the relationship between the "Father" and the Ego-I consciousness?

[Cleric K]

Thanks Cleric for such an expansive response to my question. At some level, I get what you are trying to communicate. The big challenge here is to take the spatial metaphor and translate it into experiential knowledge.

Yes, it's challenging because it requires us to exercise our whole being, not just the movement of intellectual thoughts. I've given this example many times - it's like the difference between thinking about the description of a gymnastic exercise and actually activating our will to perform it. Our being expresses through a whole spectrum of degrees of freedom. When we will our thinking we use one part of the spectrum. When we will our bodily movements we use another. For our studies we need to investigate also the degrees of freedom related to our feeling life. Ordinarily, feeling is assumed to be primarily passive phenomenon like when we say "I like this, I don't like that, I love this, I hate that". Basically we report how our inner environment feels like, just like we report the weather. To awaken our inner being, feeling must also become active force. For example, maybe some here when they have been on a team building, have done the exercise where one person allows himself to fall back as a log while his colleagues catch him. This is meant to develop the feeling of trust. In a similar way, one of the feelings that we should actively bring forth in our soul is that of trust in the deeper layers of the riverbed, that there is living Wisdom there which actually would like our life to flow in the most prolific way. It's not about blind belief but about doing scientific experiments in our inner laboratory. The results will give us some small insight that will add up to our work.

The apologist/theologian will often appeal to the various "proofs" of God. For example, the various cosmological arguments will trace a serious of events back to a first cause. This is all well and good but the determined skeptic can always point to various problems with this approach. Likewise, I'm sure a skeptic would have a field day with the various metaphors you employ. Would you say they serve more of a launching pad for personal inquiry as opposed to an apologetic for higher worlds?

A skeptic will always be hard to nudge. And this is not really confined to higher knowledge. Did you have certainty that the professional path you had chosen was the best for you? Our when choosing life partner? Or starting business? If we would like to be skeptic we can always find excuses. One may say "show me a proof that I should marry that woman? I want to be certain that this marriage will be happy and last for life." Of course this should not throw us in the opposite pole and say "Since I can't ever be fully certain, I'll just do random things - it's all the same". It's not all the same. There are lawful relations between the facts, there's harmony of the facts. The more we grasp this harmony the more we understand the flow of reality. Of course this knowledge is still partial, it's not impossible to err but as long as our ideal is to keep integrating the picture, we'll also have the means to learn from the mistakes.

We should try to understand the deeper impulses that rule human psychology. The sceptic only rarely is such because he honestly seeks the Truth. Much more often, skeptics are people who are quite comfortable where they are and simply enjoy their intellect: "I'm highly skeptical that I need to go to the store. Give me a proof that I need to go and buy bread. There are also other ways to nourish myself."

Nothing can be apologetically defended in pure intellectual thought. This is true even for ordinary science. Pure intellectual thought (like pure math) is like a spectral band of the degrees of freedom of our spiritual being. Can we combine the photons of visible light to prove that there are also UV, radio, etc. photons? Of course not. It may be possible to predict something by saying "Just like I can arrange these visible photons in such and such way, I propose that there exist as of yet undiscovered photons which will have similar properties. Yet we make a step forward only when we really investigate the other parts of spectrum and then integrate them in a bigger picture. While we stay in our limited spectrum there can never be actual proof.

The metaphors here used are launching pads but are also completely valid ways to express the fuller spectrum of reality. For example, it's a metaphor when we say that the stream of our thinking spiritual activity mineralizes as perceptions - words, moving light dot, etc. - while the invisible context serves as the riverbed of meaning which gives the direction of the stream. These are clearly analogies - we don't see actual crystals freezing out of fluid. We don't see some stream going through a riverbed. Yet when we think these images, we're doing certain thinking gestures, don't we? If I say "imagine a dog" or "imagine stream which crystalizes" we innerly do different things, we need to set in motion our imagining thinking in different ways in order to picture the first or the second image. Imagine I tell you instead "draw a square" or "draw a circle" with your hand. You draw them on the canvas and see the result. Then I ask you "Now disregard for the moment what you have drawn but consider the willing gesture that you performed in order to do that. Try to feel vividly the difference between willing a movement of the hand going in a circle or in a square." These are inner observations.

It is somewhat similar with all the metaphors (or simply images) that we give here. And that's why we keep repeating that these work only if we engage livingly in them. Otherwise it's like saying "Draw a dog" and the person says "Yeah, yeah, I've seen tons of dogs, I know them in and out". But this misses the point. In a similar way, yet more challenging than drawing, when we think livingly the riverbed analogy, when we try to picture how our thoughts precipitate from a structured potential, we're moving our 'thinking hand' in a very specific way. This feels in a specific way. It's not a big deal in itself. The secrets of the Universe won't lie open before us because of one tiny experiment. Yet it's a small experience that we have attained and then we begin to notice such things. Just think - does mainstream science or even mysticism ever lead us to such an intimate experience of how our own thinking stream forms? Not really. The materialists simply says "The brain thinks, I just see thoughts popping up on the screen in the same way a computer displays the results of computation on the display." The mystic says "These thoughts just pop up from nothingness but it's an illusion to imagine that there's a thinking force behind them. We need to let go of the thoughts and observe them objectively, as we observe dust particles in the sun's rays entering a dark room." So we should be clear that what we're speaking of is not yet another abstract theory of cognition but actual guidelines to enter into living spiritual experience of the thinking process which is really the World Process - this is the activity of the Living Cosmos. Think also about the fact how easy it is in our age that we go through our whole life and never experience the thinking stream in such reality.

These are radically different to the way a Christian off the street would conceive things or how things have been framed in the centuries of theological rumination. Does that concern you at all?

Do you see that as a problem? Isn't it precisely because of your disillusionment with the church that you moved away? This should only reinforce your feeling that there's something wrong or at least incomplete, with the conceptions of the average Christian off the street. The views may seem radical in comparison to the ruling conceptions but that's only because people rarely try to think for themselves. It is precisely with the 'radical' view that something like the Gospel of John begins to make sense.

What is the relationship between the "Father" and the Ego-I consciousness?

This of course is a very long topic but I would just try to give you a feeling for it.

Imagine that you're a Divine being and the whole reality for you is the inner Cosmos. Here 'inner' only serves to counterbalance our modern tendency to imagine everything as an objective physical world of which we have subjective experience. At your divine level there's only Cosmic Imagination. Imagine that you imagine a pulse of inner light - you fill your divine imagination with light and then gradually contract it again. Let's call this level of being the Father.

Now think about how sometimes you get engrossed in something. For your friend you look like frozen, obviously thinking of something. Then he calls you and you snap back to the rhythm of your daily works. Notice how there are two different levels of your being. One is conscious of the daily rhythm, while the other temporarily zooms in into some details and forgets about the carrier rhythm, yet still exists in its context.

This is a very crude analogy (and could be misleading in many ways) but let's move on with it. Now imagine that part of the Father's consciousness becomes engrossed into the details of the light pulse. The Father level is left behind, he supports the light field and its rhythmic pulse. For the second level the light is like an environment. It is still the light of the inner world but it is no longer felt as the result of active imagination. Instead, it feels as a higher being is holding it in place while the second level begins to exercise its spiritual activity in the light field itself. It's like the imagination of the Father creates the inner light, while the Son begins to set it in motion in different patterns. It's like now there are sub-rhythms, sub-pulses which modulate the imagination of the Father. It's like the Son stimulates life patterns - growth and expansion, then contraction into seed-like state, then expansion again. Note that this is all still an entirely inner experience. The Son doesn't imagine in the light, beings as if he sees them from the outside. He stimulates the inner experience of life, of growing and condensing from within.

Then a third level of being becomes engrossed in even further details of this inner experience. It leaves both the primordial light pulse of the Father and the life rhythms as context and focuses on even finer rhythms. A cycle of growth is now interspersed with finer rhythms. Note that this is still the very same Divine imagination, yet now both the inner substance and its life patterns feel as context. In certain sense now this level of being attains to something similar to conscious experience of what it is to be a being which has life, yet it can modulate this life through something we can call sympathies and antipathies. The being seeks certain life experiences and repels others, yet doesn't in itself rule the overall life rhythm, it only modulates is.

Each of these engrossments do not simply linearly add together but they, so to speak, multiply. It's like adding mirrors. Two mirrors reflect each other's image. When we add a third mirror it reflects the image of the first two but thein in turn the others also reflect it. So every iteration exponentially increases the complexity of the modulation of rhythms.

Finally, we imagine one more level of engrossment. Here we also have even finer sub-rhythms. These are once again modulating the nested higher rhythms. We call them thoughts. It's still the same Divine being, but at a fourth iteration of engrossment. Now that being feels creative not in the original light pulse, not in the life rhythms, not in the sympathies and antipathies within the life rhythm but in even finer sub-rhythm which arranges the meaningful reflections of what it is to be a Divine being, which feels to be submerged in inner light (perception/imagination), then feeling to metamorphose through a life rhythm, then feeling certain sympathies and antipathies towards the experience. This is the state which we can call Adamic - the Heaven state. It's still a completely spiritual state. There's a clear feeling that the light of inner imagination is the light that the Father supports - it has only become fractalized in a much more complicated patterns. There's a clear feeling also about the roles of the second and third levels. So the Divine being in the fourth iteration feels very clearly that it has been engrossed in the multiple reflections of the rhythms while its higher levels of self support the nested rhythms.

The event of the Fall signifies the fact that through certain desires, the rhythmic processes were brought into an out-of-phase condition, a hysteresis-like state, where the divine inner experience bounces from pole to pole. It is only at this stage that "their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked". The opening of the eyes is actually the loss of consciousness that the light of perception is the same light of the Divine imagination. This light image becomes shattered into pieces and thinking begins trying to stitch them together. The impression that there's an objective world-in-itself behind the subjective fragments of perception came much much later.

By transforming the way desires bounce us around, we begin to converge the hysteresis process and this also restores the vertical consciousness of the nested levels of engrossment. Then thinking is grasped to be a tiny tiny aperture of the same essential activity through which the Father level fills the Cosmic Imagination with light, except that at our level we're severely constrained through the nested rhythms. The only place where we exercise our divinity is in the creative thinking flow, which is like modulation over the World rhythms.

I repeat that all this is severely simplified and in many ways can be taken in a wrong way. The point was only to illustrate in rough strokes the nested levels of the Divine being.

[AshvinP]

I was struck by the following two points:

To speak of God the Father, means that we realize there's curvature to our inner world content. Note that even very pious persons don't at all conceive of things in this way. Instead they imagine some being which created out of itself the world and the souls. Yet we imagine that in a way not too different to the way we imagine the Big Bang.

A Christian, in the true sense of the word, is someone who has realized this esoteric reality of consciousness - that our waking self is only the surface of a gradient of conscience.

These are radically different to the way a Christian off the street would conceive things or how things have been framed in the centuries of theological rumination. Does that concern you at all?

What is the relationship between the "Father" and the Ego-I consciousness?

In connection with gradient of conscience Cleric mentions, which modern philosophy, science, and theology all equally ignore, I found the below from Steiner very helpful to contemplate. It gives a relatively clear way of imagining how the dual-world conception arises in the modern age, which is very much tied in with the ignoring of higher moral ideals and/or reduction of them into mineralized concepts. And then it weaves into the SS approach, which Cleric has been metaphorically illustrating here as well. When Nietzsche wrote the following, he was intuiting the death of the traditional Father principle and spiritual science could be understood as a living means of answering his questions through the study of the human individual and his or her Divine wholeness - “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

In our last exposition we discussed the possibility of seeing what connection there is, on the one hand, in the Kingdom of Nature with the moral or the soul, and on the other hand, to see, in the soul, that which pertains to Nature. On this point modern humanity faces a disquieting riddle. I have frequently stated in public lectures that when man applies natural laws to the universe, and looks into past times, he says to himself: Everything surrounding me has come out of the past, out of some nebular condition, and thus out of something purely material, which then was somehow differentiated and transformed, giving rise to the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human Kingdoms; a condition however which would somehow, even if in another form than in the beginning, also obtain at the end of the universe. But then what is born in us as morality, as our ideals, will be faded and forgotten and there will be the great graveyard of the physical and in this final condition of the physical that which has arisen in man like foam-bubbles of psychic development will have no meaning, just because it is only a kind of foam-bubble. The only reality then would be that which has developed physically out of the primeval mists into the marked distinctions of the various beings, only to return to the universal state of cinders. Such a view of things, to which one must come if one acknowledges honestly the modern outlook on nature, such a view can never build a bridge between the physical and the moral or psychic.

Therefore this philosophy, if it is not to be completely materialistic, seeing physical events as the only thing in the world, requires as it were, a second world — created out of the abstract. This second world, if one recognizes the first as given only to science, would be given only to faith. This faith, again indulges in the thought: Surely everything moral that arises in the human soul must have its compensation in the world; there must be something which rewards good and punishes evil, and so on. However philosophically you look at it, the result is the same. And in our time there are certainly people who acknowledge both views, in spite of the fact that they exist side by side without a bridge between them. There are people who believe everything the purely natural scientific view has to say, who subscribe to the Kant-Laplace theory of primeval mist, and everything in favour of a final cindery, slaggy condition of our evolution; and at the same time they acknowledge some religious view of things — that good works somehow find their reward, and evildoers are punished, and so on. This fact, that today there are many people whose souls are influenced by both the one and the other arises because in our time there is no little real activity of the soul, for, if there were, the same soul could not simply assume on the one hand a world-order which excludes the reality of the moral, and on the other acknowledge some power which rewards good and punishes evil.

Compare with this bridgeless and lazy thought of so many modern people — these moral and physical points of view — what I explained to you here last time as a product of Spiritual Science. I pointed out to you that we see around us, first of all, the world of light-phenomena, that we therefore see in the outer world everything which is apparent to us through what we call light. I pointed out to you how dying world-thoughts are to be seen in everything that surrounds us in the form of light: world-thoughts which one in the untold past were thought-worlds of definite beings, thought-worlds from which world-beings in their time drew their world-secrets. We meet these thoughts as light today, they are, as it were, the corpses of thought, world-though that is dying. This meets us as light. You know (to know it we need only open my Occult Science at the right place) that if we look back into the far distant past, man was not the same as we know him today; there was only a sort of sense-machine during the Saturn epoch, for instance. You know also that at that time the universe was inhabited, as it is also now. But these other beings occupied the position within the universe which man holds today. We know that those spirits which we call the Archai or Primeval Powers, stood during the old Saturn epoch on the plane of humanity; they were not like the human beings of today, but they were on a corresponding footing; during the old Sun epoch Archangels stood on the human plane, and so on. We look back therefore into the past and say: as we now go through the world as thinking men, these also went as thinking beings with human character through that world. That which lived then in them has become external world-thought; and that which lived then in them as thought, so that it would be visible from outside as their light-aura, that appears in the realities of light. So that in the realities of light we have to see dying thought-worlds. Now darkness interplays with these light-realities, and opposite to the light there lives in the darkness what psychically and spiritually can be called the will, or with a more oriental application, love. If we look out into the world therefore, we see on one side the light-world, if I may so call it; but we should not see this light-world, which was after all always transparent to the senses, unless the darkness was perceptible in it. And in darkness we have to seek on the first plane of the psychic that which lives in us as will. Just as the outer world can be regarded as a clash of darkness and light, so our own inner selves, in so far as they expand in space, can be regarded as light and darkness. Except that for our own consciousness light is thought, imagination; the darkness in us is will which becomes goodness, love and so on.

You see, we get here a philosophy of the world in which the soul contains not only what is psychic, and nature contains not only what is natural. We get here a philosophy in which nature is the result of former moral events, where light is “the dying world of thought.”... Of course it remains a question of faith, if you want to tell these people that the primeval mist is real and the future state of slag or cinders is real, and in between there are beings creating moral illusions which rise in them as foam. Faith does not lay down the last, though to be honest, it should. It is not essentially different for a man to say: There is a kind of compensation, for Nature itself is so arranged that a compensation takes place; my thoughts will become shining light. The moral organization of the world is revealed. What at one period is moral organization, is at another physical organization; and what at one time is physical organization was once moral organization. All moral things are therefore destined to emerge into physical things. Does the man who looks at Nature spiritually need still another proof that the world is morally organized? No; in Nature itself, spiritually seen, lies the justification of the moral order. One rises to this image when one regards man in his complete manhood.

[Anthony66]

Nothing can be apologetically defended in pure intellectual thought...

So if we take the first cause cosmological argument for the existence of God, where does it break down? Essentially we trace a series of cause/effects backwards and given that a concrete infinity can't exist (or so it is argued), there must be a first cause, a.k.a God.

But if we trace back a temporal chain of events, there's always the question of the nature of time itself. I've always thought we don't have a good handle on this. I've seen your fractal fish videos which speak to my intuitions.

But the sophisticated apologist will try to divorce the causal chain from the temporal aspect, focusing on the sequence of cause/effect events in isolation. But my mind goes to Hume where he put into doubt the reality of causality as commonly understood.

How does SS navigate these waters?