Steiner's anarchism

[JustinG]

In closing summation, you have ignored every direct Steiner quote I provided, instead responding with brief letters, fragments of quotes, and tables of contents from another person's book, and it's still not even clear what your argument is, other than "I don't like the idea of higher cognition and maybe Steiner would have agreed with me for a couple years". Even if that's true, does it actually have any relevance for what each individual can be doing today to approach higher spiritual realms? Not at all.

I know you have provided lots of quotes, and I appreciate that. But I'm talking about quotes specifically in relation to what was in the post, which amounts to the issue of whether it is in accordance with PoF not to seek to attain higher levels of spiritual development until earlier levels have been attained (for which the converse issue is whether it is detrimental to do otherwise). Also, without page number references it is difficult to place the quotes you provide in context.

In terms of my argument, part of my purpose has been to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at least, that the 'Jordan Peterson fan' interpretation of PoF is not the only valid interpretation. Thank you for your assistance in demonstrating that.

[AshvinP]

In closing summation, you have ignored every direct Steiner quote I provided, instead responding with brief letters, fragments of quotes, and tables of contents from another person's book, and it's still not even clear what your argument is, other than "I don't like the idea of higher cognition and maybe Steiner would have agreed with me for a couple years". Even if that's true, does it actually have any relevance for what each individual can be doing today to approach higher spiritual realms? Not at all.

I know you have provided lots of quotes, and I appreciate that. But I'm talking about quotes specifically in relation to what was in the post, which amounts to the issue of whether it is in accordance with PoF not to seek to attain higher levels of spiritual development until earlier levels have been attained (for which the converse issue is whether it is detrimental to do otherwise). Also, without page number references it is difficult to place the quotes you provide in context.

In terms of my argument, part of my purpose has been to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at least, that the 'Jordan Peterson fan' interpretation of PoF is not the only valid interpretation. Thank you for your assistance in demonstrating that.

So the bold has been your argument this entire time? Then yes we all agree, seek practical reason first before Imaginative cognition. Of course, this has not actually been your argument, but is only now being mentioned for some reason.

The quotes I provided were multiple paragraphs and had chapter numbers from PoF. How does that compare to the ones you provided from Steiner? It's quite amazing to me that, in order to establish Steiner's position, you think it is better to reference the table of contents from some random person's book who Steiner might have read, than to reference his own "pre-Theosophical" writings.

I have no idea what Jordan Peterson has to do with this. He isn't even aware of Steiner or PoF.

[lorenzop]

Isn't this the view logically necessitated by idealism? The outer appearances of anything in the Cosmos must be the inner qualitative state-activity of another conscious being. Unless we say it is solely the product of our own conscious activity, which is egoic solipsism. So it seems the main difference between Steiner and BK is the former says we can reason our way to more precise knowledge of those other beings and their conscious activity, while BK says we can only know anything about them after physical death (assuming we don't lose all individuality and merge back into 'instinctive' MAL). I think we can all agree that, IF such beings and their activity can be known, it wou lld have quite a lot do with spiritual growth. Am I mistaken? So, again, it all comes down to the one epistemic issue of whether there is hard limits to perception-thinking in this lifetime.

The Gita seems to take the stance that 'even the wise are bewildered' re complete knowledge of the relative world (workings of 3 gunas)- but I see this as not a point of contention - whether there are limits to understanding is an issue we can postpone till it becomes relevant.
The question I am raising to Cleric is what does it mean/entail to be a 'spiritual being' . . . I am proposing spiritual being means a non-doing transcendent silent witness - Cleric suggesting that spiritual being also entails an understanding of spiritual objects/processes/powers. I'm suggesting that having an interest/proficiency in spiritual objects/being/powers is a personal preference, and a dangerous/distracting preference at that.
Patanjali says as much in his yoga sutras.
I think Steiner is into this 'stuff' because flashy stuff sells.

[AshvinP]

Isn't this the view logically necessitated by idealism? The outer appearances of anything in the Cosmos must be the inner qualitative state-activity of another conscious being. Unless we say it is solely the product of our own conscious activity, which is egoic solipsism. So it seems the main difference between Steiner and BK is the former says we can reason our way to more precise knowledge of those other beings and their conscious activity, while BK says we can only know anything about them after physical death (assuming we don't lose all individuality and merge back into 'instinctive' MAL). I think we can all agree that, IF such beings and their activity can be known, it wou lld have quite a lot do with spiritual growth. Am I mistaken? So, again, it all comes down to the one epistemic issue of whether there is hard limits to perception-thinking in this lifetime.

The Gita seems to take the stance that 'even the wise are bewildered' re complete knowledge of the relative world (workings of 3 gunas)- but I see this as not a point of contention - whether there are limits to understanding is an issue we can postpone till it becomes relevant.
The question I am raising to Cleric is what does it mean/entail to be a 'spiritual being' . . . I am proposing spiritual being means a non-doing transcendent silent witness - Cleric suggesting that spiritual being also entails an understanding of spiritual objects/processes/powers. I'm suggesting that having an interest/proficiency in spiritual objects/being/powers is a personal preference, and a dangerous/distracting preference at that.
Patanjali says as much in his yoga sutras.
I think Steiner is into this 'stuff' because flashy stuff sells.

It is precisely the act of "postponing" which rules out the possibility of ever moving beyond the limits of our own understanding at any given time. Why do we expect spiritual wisdom of this sort to simply be handed out to us while we wait passively and procrastinate? Does that ever happen in any other sphere of our physical lives?

If we regard the spiritual beings as alien life completely disconnected from our own lives and spiritual activity, then what you say could make sense. And that is indeed how they are regarded with the arbitrary hard limits and noumenon-phenomenon divides in place. But Cleric and myself have pointed over and over to the sphere of concrete overlap between the perceptual forms of our experience and the deeper meaning of those forms in the observation of our Thinking activity. Once one discovers this concrete overlap in their own Thinking experience, it becomes quite impractical and inconceivable that the realm of archetypal ideation and meaning is wholly remote and unlike our own spiritual activity.

[Cleric K]

The Gita seems to take the stance that 'even the wise are bewildered' re complete knowledge of the relative world (workings of 3 gunas)- but I see this as not a point of contention - whether there are limits to understanding is an issue we can postpone till it becomes relevant.
The question I am raising to Cleric is what does it mean/entail to be a 'spiritual being' . . . I am proposing spiritual being means a non-doing transcendent silent witness - Cleric suggesting that spiritual being also entails an understanding of spiritual objects/processes/powers. I'm suggesting that having an interest/proficiency in spiritual objects/being/powers is a personal preference, and a dangerous/distracting preference at that.
Patanjali says as much in his yoga sutras.
I think Steiner is into this 'stuff' because flashy stuff sells.

Lorenzo, it seems you have missed the point of the Masc/Fem post. You propose the silent non-doing witness (complete receptivity, Cosmic Feminine). But there's clearly also doing in the Cosmos. We do it in our thinking, feeling and willing. This is what is called in the most general sense spiritual activity (the masculine princple). So I'm suggesting not simply to gain understanding of spiritual objects/processes/powers in order to satisfy some vain curiosity. We need it in order to guide our co-creative activity in a direction which is in alignment with the Cosmic unfoldings.

So let's be clear. You see these things as dangerous because you consider that the ideal is to transcend the human state through complete detachment where there's no longer any doing. Seen in this way, the logical conclusion is that doing belongs only to lower beings and the worlds manifest as the result of such lower doing. But this is a gamble. We can't know if this is the case until death. At the same time, we turn blind eye on the Earthly affairs on the pretext that they are result of lower order doing and it's in principle impossible that they can be bettered. They can only be transcended.

But what if the higher being is not completely Feminine? What if the Spirit - the Cosmic Masculine - is inseparable part of the One Consciousness at all levels of existence? This would mean that certain higher forces create (through doing) the worlds within which we manifest our small doings. It seems we've messed that badly and now we want to leave everything behind, instead of understanding how to be musically co-creative with the deeper lawfulness of the Cosmos.

So in short. On one hand we have the desire to renounce all spiritual activity (doing) and seek transcendence of the human state. This implies that there's nothing to be done here except our personal salvation. The world is a sandbox weaved of lowly doings so it's out of the question that it can ever become something higher. On the other hand we have the possibility to investigate the hidden constrains which shape our doing (as manifesting in thinking, feeling, willing). The more we do that, the more we see that the forces of evil are nothing but those who try to keep us ignorant of our deeper nature. As long as we're blind for the depths of our being, we manifest practically almost random behavior in our T, F, W at the surface. When we make even the most preliminary steps in this deepening, we see that it's fully within the powers of man to shed these cocoons of ignorance and begin to manifest his doing based on higher Wisdom and Love, in accordance to Truth. All of these things are verifiable here and now. We don't need to wait for death. So it's really humanity's call to make up our minds if we want to grow up or we prefer to close our eyes and in silent witnessing to wait for death where we await our salvation.

[JustinG]

In closing summation, you have ignored every direct Steiner quote I provided, instead responding with brief letters, fragments of quotes, and tables of contents from another person's book, and it's still not even clear what your argument is, other than "I don't like the idea of higher cognition and maybe Steiner would have agreed with me for a couple years". Even if that's true, does it actually have any relevance for what each individual can be doing today to approach higher spiritual realms? Not at all.

I know you have provided lots of quotes, and I appreciate that. But I'm talking about quotes specifically in relation to what was in the post, which amounts to the issue of whether it is in accordance with PoF not to seek to attain higher levels of spiritual development until earlier levels have been attained (for which the converse issue is whether it is detrimental to do otherwise). Also, without page number references it is difficult to place the quotes you provide in context.

In terms of my argument, part of my purpose has been to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at least, that the 'Jordan Peterson fan' interpretation of PoF is not the only valid interpretation. Thank you for your assistance in demonstrating that.

So the bold has been your argument this entire time? Then yes we all agree, seek practical reason first before Imaginative cognition. Of course, this has not actually been your argument, but is only now being mentioned for some reason.

The quotes I provided were multiple paragraphs and had chapter numbers from PoF. How does that compare to the ones you provided from Steiner? It's quite amazing to me that, in order to establish Steiner's position, you think it is better to reference the table of contents from some random person's book who Steiner might have read, than to reference his own "pre-Theosophical" writings.

I have no idea what Jordan Peterson has to do with this. He isn't even aware of Steiner or PoF.

Whilst you may consider yourself to be functioning at a level beyond practical reason, your description of Tucker as 'some random person' nevertheless indicates you have a limited knowledge of Steiner's early work. Tucker and Mackay's views are basically adaptations of Stirner's philosophy, which was a big influence on Steiner.

Cleric or Scott - do you have any opinions on the relevance of the work of Tucker, Mackay and Stirner for understanding PoF?

As for Jordan Peterson, had it not been for your frequent extolling of him, I probably would have picked up a copy of PoF long ago

[lorenzop]

Lorenzo, it seems you have missed the point of the Masc/Fem post. You propose the silent non-doing witness (complete receptivity, Cosmic Feminine). But there's clearly also doing in the Cosmos. We do it in our thinking, feeling and willing. This is what is called in the most general sense spiritual activity (the masculine princple). So I'm suggesting not simply to gain understanding of spiritual objects/processes/powers in order to satisfy some vain curiosity. We need it in order to guide our co-creative activity in a direction which is in alignment with the Cosmic unfoldings.

So let's be clear. You see these things as dangerous because you consider that the ideal is to transcend the human state through complete detachment where there's no longer any doing. Seen in this way, the logical conclusion is that doing belongs only to lower beings and the worlds manifest as the result of such lower doing. But this is a gamble. We can't know if this is the case until death. At the same time, we turn blind eye on the Earthly affairs on the pretext that they are result of lower order doing and it's in principle impossible that they can be bettered. They can only be transcended.

I confess the cosmic feminine / masculine makes no sense to me - and personnally I'm not interested in whether Saturn is male or feminine. . . and only God (as deity or function) has ownership of 'doing'. . .
Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutras does propose a method where one can culture the ability to think and act from or near the source of thought - where one's thought and actions can have more influence. But Patanjali is agnostic re the content of thought - he doesn't suggest that this content is more spiritual and this content is less so.
Putting the aside to the side, does Steiner or others propose a technique where anyone can develop this spiritual thinking?

[AshvinP]

I know you have provided lots of quotes, and I appreciate that. But I'm talking about quotes specifically in relation to what was in the post, which amounts to the issue of whether it is in accordance with PoF not to seek to attain higher levels of spiritual development until earlier levels have been attained (for which the converse issue is whether it is detrimental to do otherwise). Also, without page number references it is difficult to place the quotes you provide in context.

In terms of my argument, part of my purpose has been to demonstrate, to my own satisfaction at least, that the 'Jordan Peterson fan' interpretation of PoF is not the only valid interpretation. Thank you for your assistance in demonstrating that.

So the bold has been your argument this entire time? Then yes we all agree, seek practical reason first before Imaginative cognition. Of course, this has not actually been your argument, but is only now being mentioned for some reason.

The quotes I provided were multiple paragraphs and had chapter numbers from PoF. How does that compare to the ones you provided from Steiner? It's quite amazing to me that, in order to establish Steiner's position, you think it is better to reference the table of contents from some random person's book who Steiner might have read, than to reference his own "pre-Theosophical" writings.

I have no idea what Jordan Peterson has to do with this. He isn't even aware of Steiner or PoF.

Whilst you may consider yourself to be functioning at a level beyond practical reason, your description of Tucker as 'some random person' nevertheless indicates you have a limited knowledge of Steiner's early work. Tucker and Mackay's views are basically adaptations of Stirner's philosophy, which was a big influence on Steiner.

Cleric or Scott - do you have any opinions on the relevance of the work of Tucker, Mackay and Stirner for understanding PoF?

As for Jordan Peterson, had it not been for your frequent extolling of him, I probably would have picked up a copy of PoF long ago

Justin,

I don't know why you keep making these comments in bold. It reads to me like, "if you had not made the case for individual sovereignty, I wouldn't have locked myself in a cage and eaten the key". It's a sad image, but it doesn't make me feel like I screwed up by mentioning the names of people who trigger you. I am not letting the words of other people do that to me.

Steiner was the most prolific reader and writer in human history, as far as I can tell. He has commented on absolutely every major thinker and philosophy in Western history. Of course those ideas had an influence on him. Plato, Aristotle, Eckhart, Aquinas, Goethe Hegel, Stirner, Nietzche, and many ideas in between. Even Kant's! Not the individual personalities, mind you, but the Idea-beings for whom they were vehicles of manifestation into the world, as we all are.

Once we abandon the atomic ego view of human souls and correspondence theory of truth, we will stop trying to match up concepts from one thinker to another and search for the deeper layers of archetypal spiritual activity which harmonizes them all at ever more conscious levels of integration. That is a genuine vertical movements towards spiritual freedom. Otherwise we remain endlessly on the horizontal plane entangled in circles of abstractions and flattened concepts which cannot harmonize of their own accord.

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An obstacle we will quickly encounter when mining the meaningful lessons of virtual reality interfaces is the habitual movement of our thinking. Our intellectual reasoning is habituated to moving only horizontally along a plane of perceptions, connecting isolated quantities together and formulating a dim 'idea' of what they might mean. This mode of horizontal thinking will never really deepen our understanding of aesthetic phenomena. There are many reasons why, but we can also take a pragmatic approach here and ask ourselves, have we ever really deepened our understanding of aesthetic phenomena in this manner? Have we ever listened to a piece of music or read a work of poetry and mined its deeper layers of meaning by horizontally configuring and reconfiguring the notes or the words together in various ways? We will quickly realize that this approach is simply not fruitful for the Imagination. Our intellectual reason can discern meaning deeply and quite precisely, but only if we ourselves give it the impetus to do so; only if our spiritual core lends it the vertical thrust by which it can discover the depth structure of our flattened perceptions. Moving our thinking activity in a direction that we are not used to is the concrete image of a 'paradigm shift'.


"In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved matrix of space...

Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world...

But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another. Equally, it is why, before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all."

-Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

[Cleric K]

I confess the cosmic feminine / masculine makes no sense to me - and personnally I'm not interested in whether Saturn is male or feminine. . .

It makes no sense if we try to conceive it abstractly, as for example we conceive the strong and weak nuclear force. I'm not speaking of some principles out there in another world. It's what we experience in ourselves - receptivity and activity. It's not a question to speculate who is the doer and whether there's a doer at all. These two principles are givens in our experience. No matter what we call it, no matter if we believe if everything is determined by external forces, the fact remains that we experience ourselves as innerly involved with our doing. Even the greatest determinist still lives as if his activity is real. No one in his right mind doesn't study for their exam because they believe it is all predetermined. At every point our past is the accumulation of our activity. The clearest place where we can experience this is our thinking. There our activity is instantly manifested as perceptions.

. . . and only God (as deity or function) has ownership of 'doing'. . .

Again, it's not about speculating about the nature behind the doing but about understanding the constraints within which our activity operates and how we can make it ever freer by aligning it with the World Harmony. Other than that, the Deity has clearly not reserved 'doing' as his exclusive attribute:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do

Putting the aside to the side, does Steiner or others propose a technique where anyone can develop this spiritual thinking?

Well, this is the topic of practically every post here The thinking path is laid down in PoF. The further development of thinking into higher spiritual activity is the topic of Initiatic Science.

[Martin_]

As for Jordan Peterson, had it not been for your frequent extolling of him, I probably would have picked up a copy of PoF long ago

As in
* Jordan Peterson is Bad.
* Ashvin likes Jordan Peterson
* Ashvin likes PoF
Therefore Pof is Bad.

?

yeh, that's logical.
</sarcasm>