Eugene I. wrote: ↑Sun Dec 26, 2021 11:44 pm
It is strange to see so much rejection and resistance to the nonduality by anthroposophists. There might be some deeper spiritual reasons for that, the division may originate in the noncorporeal realms, who knows...
It's interesting to note that Steiner called the afterlife realm "kamaloka" (which literally means "the realm of desires" in Sanskrit), but according to the Buddhist cosmology that realm belongs to Brahmaloka - the realm of Brahma - the deity-creator of the astral/etheric/material worlds, with a hierarchy of his servants, and this is the realm of dualities belonging to samsara. No wonder their philosophy is so opposed to nonduality. This is of course quite esoteric, but still...
I was trying to unify the nondual and Steinerian worldviews into an integrated one, but I think Cleric is right, they are incompatible. And the difference is not simply philosophical, they represent completely different sets of spiritual goals and values.
Eugene, here you build upon very fragmentary understanding.
"Steiner called the afterlife realm "kamaloka"" This is as if you opened at a random page of a book, read a word and claim that this is all the author said. If you had read even only a few more pages you would see that kamaloka refers to a specific
stage of the journey after death. And here once again we see how misleading everything becomes when there's no proper notion of Time and spiritual metamorphic unfolding. The idea that the incorporeal state is somehow a timeless Gödel arena, is very misleading. Just as we pass in normal life through growth, changing of the teeth, puberty, adulthood, etc., so we continue through similar stages after the separation of the body. Kamaloka refers to the stage where we purify precisely the web of sympathies and antipathies, which we can purify also while in the body. Kamaloka is not some separate realm that we go to only after death. We live in it even now with our desires but our bodily life gives means to satisfy these desires. When the bodily instruments are laid down, we're left with the desires (which live in the soul/astral body) but we lose the means to satisfy then. The state can be compared to feeling burning thirst in the midst of a desert. These states continue as we long as we learn that we must transform the desires themselves. Then life continues in more spiritual states, where we live in the archetypal forces of man and the Cosmos.
Please note that all these things are verifiable. We only need to make at least few steps in the direction to discover how our desires act as the deeper arrow rhythms, at the tip of which our thinking unfolds.
When the desire to imagine a free electron paradigm after death is so strong that it prevents the only direction from which real self-knowledge can be attained, then no amount of explanations can help. The incompatibility of paths is not some superficial disagreement. It's really about the desire to stay on the inner side of the threshold of death and fantasize whatever afterlife mechanics suit us, instead of pursuing the only logical path that can give answers to these questions. Please note this. The situation is not symmetric. The path of evolution doesn't reject, disbelieve, misunderstand the ancients paths. It's quite the opposite. They are understood, integrated but development goes further. On the other hand, the ancient paths dismiss the evolutionary development for completely different reasons - because they don't understand it and as a rule it must be rejected. This understanding is feared because it threatens the ancient state. It cannot be dismissed by understanding it, because this would only make it more and more logical and self-evident. This would be like trying to dismiss the Pythagorean theorem by understanding it and then trying to show it is false. But the more we understand it, the more we see its inner logic. For this reason we can only reject it if we stay outside it and launch superficial attacks. Such is the situation in spirituality today. The evolutionary path which begins to integrate the consciousness on both sides of the threshold of death can't be dismissed by understanding it because this would in itself dismantle the naive belief in the free electron paradigm. Such a paradigm can be supported only when self-knowledge is kept at safe distance (by the veil dogma for example). For this reason, higher knowledge can be rejected only based on superficial attacks, based on misunderstanding (like the Kamaloka example above).
Dana has grasped quite some of the inner logic of these things but now faces the final fortification of the Earthly self. There's inner rebellion to conceive that there could be something within ourselves, which understands much better our life path and to which the Earthly self works in opposition most of the time.
Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Mon Dec 27, 2021 2:57 am
Mind you, it's never been in my nature to latch onto any given teacher, or teaching, as the be all and end all, as some seem to be prone to do. Likewise, I'm not about to become attached to Cleric either.
It is actually in the nature of our age that there shouldn't be attachment to external authority. The question is, can it be conceived the the real Master lives with the deeper layers (the periphery of the funnel) and that most of the time we're a quite disobedient apprentice? And I know for a fact that this point is the most difficult for most people. The logic goes like: why should I turn to an inner Master if I'm already the only Self there is?
One way to approach this question is by meditating on the nature of conscience. We know very well how our desires are fully capable of disregarding the quiet whisper of conscience. If we can grasp this polarity properly, we've already accomplished quite a lot. From that point we can understand that there are deeper layers of self which are obscured by other layers - and very few of these layers are conscious! We need real scientific knowledge of how to restore the communication flow with these deeper layers of self. Not by reducing them and explaining them away with intellectual abstractions but by developing the fully conscious means of relating to our higher being, which is also the true Teacher, the true Master. All external personalities serve only to lead us to a point where we know how to speak to the Master within. If we feel that it's foolish to speak to the Master who arts in the depths and whose voice we dimly hear in conscience, we're not yet giving up the fortification of the Earthly self. We keep the desire to feel as top authority in our conscious world. This desire would be one of the first that we will have to dismantle with our own hands in Kamaloka. We can support the abstract belief that we're seeing things from the apex of awareness, only because of the bodily shell which keeps us in the shade of Truth. Once outside the shell, everything around us proves the
impossibility of what we had desired. We could have easily avoided this disappointment in Kamaloka, only if we had not shied away from self-knowledge while still in the body.