Re: Steiner's anarchism
Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2022 9:51 pm
The difficulty is that it is up to us to take the facts to their ultimate conclusions. I suppose most of us have known the feeling at some point of our life when we had some floating task given to us by someone but since they haven't recently mentioned it, we also keep quiet, secretly hoping that they might have forgotten about it. We're in much the same situation regarding our own development. We won't be reminded of the task by our modern civilized world. Actually they will ridicule us and try to prove how wrong we are. So if we keep quiet hoping that no one will remember about this, we can actually go through our entire life, relieved that we've gone 'below the radar'.Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Sat Jan 15, 2022 11:13 am There are a lot of insights here about what is called "higher cognition". I'd have said that a lot of people express this at times (when inspired to do so). Is there anyone who expresses higher cognition most of the time and with clear benefit to the world? Can anyone name names? If we can agree on good role models, I think that would be helpful to the discussion, which otherwise tends to be rather impersonal.
When we look at something like the second picture of AG, we see something which for many people is deeply disturbing. Our heads are open-ended and on top of that they are part of common fabric. This is the first place we can try to get under the radar. We can say: "This doesn't seem right. I don't feel such open ends within me, thus there should be some dissociative boundary, some veil." If we overcome this dualism, which simply creates another hard problem, we may accept something like that painting, which should be logical for any monist outlook. Yet we still accept that only 'on paper', we still hope we'll go under the radar.
If we need to go even further, things begin to become scary. We're faced with the logical conclusions of our observations. As long as we keep these ideas at a distance it's easy to view them as abstract musings, even if on some level we consider them believable. But if we follow the ideas all the way, we reach a point where we simply have to face their full weight. If we follow the ideas to their conclusions it should be clear that our thoughts and feelings affect the world, and the world's thoughts and feelings affect us. Today we are forced to accept that only for our will. We can't deny that our wills confront each other in a shared stratum of reality which impresses in us through the sensory spectrum. Yet we secretly hope that when we lift to feeling and thinking, these forms of spiritual activity exist in a Faraday cage, completely shielded from the outer world.
This is the first problem. We need to work on purity. Purity of thoughts, feelings and actions. As long as we feel the need to hide something in our Faraday cage, we'll also be seeking theories that will put our conscience to sleep.
Then we need Love. We need Love for which, unfortunately, we have no good examples in the world. We need Love which makes us feel other beings even closer that we feel our own family. We need Love so strong that we're willing to live our Life for the world. As long as we want to secretly keep something for ourselves, we still prefer to stay in our shell.
We would never be able to do that if we depend on our own forces. We simply don't have that much capital. The paintings don't illustrate it, there's always some compromise when we put things into pictures, but all reality rests on a Cosmic Flow that proceeds from One and returns to One. It's a superfluid, frictionless flow, yet along the complicated convolutions of the two streams, all reality manifests.
We can't create that Love through our human capabilities. We can only align with that inexhaustible and eternal flow and become a creative channel for it. Whoever is blessed to reach this experience in this lifetime, will know the elixir of everlasting Life. This is not the enlightenment of the old. The great sages of old reached the point where they prepared their channel - pure, strong, disinterested, wise. All that was needed was to anticipate in Cosmic awe, the moment when the Water of Love will begin to flow. Wherever this stream passes, deserts turn into gardens, fruit trees grow, animals and birds come to quench their thirst. Love comes from on High, enters the soul world through the heart, takes shape through our spiritual voice organ and becomes thoughts.
The role model for our age can no longer be found in the sensory world. We can find it only when we enter the living Love flow of the Spirit. To find that role model we need to have set for ourselves a High Ideal - to understand, to work, to be free. There's a Being which already possess all these virtues. This Being is our future Cosmic Self. We become what our ideal is. If we set low ideal, we'll have mediocre results. If we set a high ideal, if we seek the Divine, we won't receive a king's mantle, a scepter and treasure chest. Instead, we'll be given work. We must become the Divine Being - bit by bit, every jewel in the crown is a virtue we must win for the benefit of the whole Cosmos through hard work. We receive that work when we step into the Love flow coming from our future Being through our heart and becomes thoughts and deeds in our present. Time is not what we think it is.
All these things are real. Compared to them our sensory-intellectual consciousness is a dim dream. Even mystical enlightenment is only a state of Cosmic anticipation of reality.
The goal of the Earthly realm is to experience freedom. To be free means that one day we stumble upon a question which we must resolve in absolute freedom. We can't 'ask the audience'. We can't 'phone a friend'. We can't find intellectual proof - this would leave us unfree. We won't choose because of freedom but because of the compulsion of the proof. Our small Earthly self must choose what it wants to become. It must choose if it wants to step in the Love Flow and find the open-endedness of consciousness.
Of course all this is not to say that we don't need living human examples. In fact we do. Yet the goal is not simply to copy their behavior but to reach the point where we ourselves step in the Love Flow. Then we become the role model in the act of becoming its future potential. Even though the highest being is One, it is only by becoming it that we are truly unique. Just as our position in space is unique, so our soul constellation is unique and Love flows in a unique way through us. No one can take our place and do for the Cosmos what we can do from our unique perspective. If we don't take our unique place then it means that we want to take someone else's place, to be someone else. When we try to be someone outside the Love Flow, even if we don't know it, we're trying to be something which has already existed, which has already been played out. Whatever we find outside the Love Flow, belongs to the past. It has come from Love through another being, we have found the bones of it and said "This is what I want to be". We do that just because we want to feel as an authority, we want to feel that what we become is entirely under our control. But when we turn to the role model of the One, things become different. It's like saying "I want to become something new, something which no being has ever been before. If I find that something in my environment and copy it, then it is not new, it was already there, someone manifested it before me. The only way I can become something truly new is if I open up for it to flow into me. If it is truly new then even I can't know beforehand what it is. I only know that this something is full of Love, Wisdom, Truth. I can't fit it into my current conceptions but I can allow it to enter, to approach me from the future and become my present. Only in this way I'm becoming something truly new and alive. It is not that someone else chooses my future. It's that I allow myself to become without seeing it but seeking it through Love, what I myself would choose to become if I could see the future."
And this is also the dilemma of modern man. He wants to expand, he wants to know reality but he's not willing to change. He allows for a change only if he first perceives the change, examines it, approves it and then allows it to draw closer. But this is nothing new. We become something old, something that is already manifested. We're simply copying it. We can only become our true being if we understand the secret of Time and allow our Divine future to flow in us in full consciousness. This flow won't do the job instead of us but it will give us the Love, Wisdom and Strength to do the work through our own spiritual activity.