AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jun 03, 2022 11:30 pm
Grant wrote:Indeed, the question is whether we can draw parallels between “life and death” and our living experiences. This may seem like an oxymoron, but only because our concept of death is based on that which isn’t in living context. From our living, outer-observations of death, all we can directly deduce is that the natural body is no longer a function of the spirit. Our only experiences of a perceived disconnection with our own body (sense perceptions) is through altered forms of consciousness. We should draw upon these when considering the implications of death. Some of these induce a reduction of consciousness, some induce an elevation of consciousness, and others appear to do both (sleeping/dreaming).
But there is a big difference between altering our state of consciousness, inducing it in some way, and developing it through inner effort. To discern this difference, we must remember it's not only our outer observations which give our understanding of "death", or anything else, but our inner conceptual reasoning. If the latter remains the same, and the mode of observing changes, then why should we get any more living understanding of what death actually is, in its essence? This is why thinking is left in the blind spot - if simply altering the mode of perceiving gives us a higher understanding of what is under consideration, then things are much easier. We can ingest substances, or do a few meditations, and reach this understanding, and then
stop, rinse, and repeat as often or not as often as we like. If our very mode of
thinking must shift as we move from outer to inner, however, then it means developing, maintaining, and growing new thinking skills, which is ongoing effortful practice. Then our intellectual judgments of altered experience no longer suffice. We then need to approach it like developing and growing any new skill, such as playing an instrument.
Who wants to do that for thinking itself? To withhold making judgments on all manner of fundamental topics of consideration, to refrain from playing the instrument which is the human soul, until the skills are developed? It feels much better, and safer, to continue making judgments but never reach firm conclusions - maybe after death we dissolve back into MAL bliss, maybe we continue on as alters and reincarnate after some indeterminate period, maybe we enter eternal paradise with God and angels, who really knows? This is the stance we question here as born of intellectual pride, fear of the unknown depths of soul, and therefore intentional incompleteness of reasoning (mostly subconscious). We must confront the natural fear of the spiritual within us - it feels very uncomfortable and dangerous to abandon the stable world of outer perceptions and intellectual judgments (natural), and turn to the world of spiritual experience (moral), which our own soul activity is always bound up with. Our darkest qualities may then be reflected back to us and/or we may lose our stable perceptual identity completely in the void.
So we need a good deal of inner courage to confront spiritual knowledge from within. The outer world of stable perceptions must darken to our will and our thinking, and we must enter entirely unknown, dynamic, and seemingly unstable territory within our soul to unveil the higher Light behind the abyss of darkness inside. In ancient times, these things took place in the Mystery centers - it was quite the physical and mental ordeal for the initiate to go through before ascending to perception-cognition of higher worlds. Something akin to physical death was actually necessary. Now, the 'mystery center' is the heart and soul of the individual. We are all potential initiates today and the physical ordeal is mostly absent, but the spiritual ordeal is still a frightening prospect, especially in modern culture where ordeals of all sorts are discouraged. Confronting our inner shadows feels just as frightening as physical death for many of us. People want to be protected and insulated from every little danger, outer and inner. Yet these people are not aware there is another option in which we grow spiritually strong, beautiful, and wise through confronting the darkness within our soul to transfigure and redeem it.
https://rsarchive.org/Articles/GA036/En ... l_e04.html
"The habits of thinking that have come to be accepted in the modern study of nature [Naturerkenntnis] can yield no satisfying results for the study of the soul. What one would grasp with these habits of thinking must either be spread out in repose before the soul or, if the object of knowledge is in movement, the soul must feel itself extricated from this movement. For to participate in the movement of the object of knowledge means to lose oneself in it, to transform oneself, so to speak, into it.
How should the soul grasp itself, however, in an act of knowing in which it must lose itself? It can expect self-knowledge only in an activity in which, step by step, it comes into possession of itself.
This can only be an activity that is creative. Here, however, a cause for uncertainty arises at once for the knower. He believes he will lapse into personal arbitrariness.
It is precisely this arbitrariness that he gives up in the knowledge of nature. He excludes himself and lets nature hold sway. He seeks certainty in a realm which his individual soul being does not reach. In seeking self-knowledge he cannot conduct himself in this way. He must take himself along wherever he seeks to know. He therefore can find no nature on his path to self-knowledge. For where she would encounter him, there he is no longer to be found.
This, however, provides just the experience that is needed with regard to the spirit. One cannot expect other than to find the spirit when, through one's own activity, nature, as it were, melts away; that is, when one experiences oneself ever more strongly in proportion to one's feeling this melting away.
If one fills the soul with something that afterward proves to be like a dream in its illusory character, and one experiences the illusory in its true nature, then one becomes stronger in one's own experience of self. In confronting a dream, one's thinking corrects the belief one has in the dream's reality while dreaming. Concerning the activity of fantasy, this correction is not needed because one did not have this belief. Concerning the meditative soul activity, to which one devotes oneself for spirit-knowledge, one cannot be satisfied with mere thought correction. One must correct by
experiencing. One must first create the illusory thinking with one's activity and then extinguish it by a different, equally strong, activity.
In this act of extinguishing, another activity awakens, the spirit-knowing activity. For if the extinguishing is real, then the force for it must come from an entirely different direction than from nature. With the experienced illusion one has dispersed what nature can give; what inwardly arises during the dispersion is no longer nature.
With this activity something is needed that does not come into consideration in the study of nature: inner courage." (Steiner, On the Life of the Soul)
Grant wrote:The association you make between “death and responsibility” is interesting. It might first be important to note that taking on more responsibility than we can handle is just as irresponsible as taking on “too little responsibility”. Our moral obligation is to optimize circumstance in the greatest responsibility we can bear to maximize the probability of surplus for the degree of freedom we invest. If our degrees of freedom for choice are limited then we should accordingly limit that which we make ourselves responsible for. Furthermore, we can also take into consideration, not only our degrees of freedom for choice in each moment of action, but also across our entire life expectancy; how much energy is spent on us from the universe, and how much energy we expend to the universe throughout our lifespan. This puts into context our order within the complexity chain of consciousness. We can reasonably infer that our influence on the world is meant to be limited only to that which is expected of us throughout our lifespan, so our influence on the world is to some degree proportional to our capabilities with respect to the moral demands of the world. Thus, it is our moral responsibility to live and also to die. For a long time, I have considered that the greatest act we could perform to serve the universe would be to commit suicide on its behalf (only if beneficial — I dont believe that our limited capacities for living often, or ever require this level of responsibility).
This is similar to our lungs, and how they only produce a limited amount of oxygen on regular intervals. If our lungs instead constantly produced some overwhelmingly massive amount of oxygen, we would die of oxygen toxicity. But as things are, our lungs intake oxygen and it spreads throughout our bloodstream in useful quantities. There is; the moment of oxygen intake, oxygen transfer, and oxygen delivery — repeat. Our oxygen intake can’t exceed the limit of that which can be transferred to our bloodstream at once before we experience oxygen toxicity, etc. Meanwhile, our nervous system records whether our lungs provide enough oxygen to our bloodstream, and moderates the rate of oxygen intake accordingly.
The lung metaphor can be taken much deeper, but that might be a good spot to stop for an introduction. Though my larger proposal is that death has 2 stages (all part of 1 true stage). Ego dissolution and then unity with God. The first stage probably involves a life review and then an opportunity to wash away our sins with the helping hand of God. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if these processes were different for everyone, depending on their moral standing and primary modes of action (personality) within this life.
Related to what I responded above, I think most people today are hardly at risk of taking on "too much" responsibility, given how little is currently taken. As a precondition, we must
know what we are actually capable of doing with our Spirit before assessing whether it is too much to take on. We simply won't have that knowledge until we delve into the depths of the soul and unveil it. This can be done, as Steiner indicates above. You are certainly correct that there is great balancing Wisdom at work in both the microcosmic human organism and the Macrocosm. But that Wisdom is still an
ideal for us at this stage. We wouldn't even know where to begin balancing the physical, life, and soul processes if we were given creative responsibility for them. Is that a reason to say, "well I guess my current level of responsibility is fine because I don't know enough to do more, and would therefore screw it up"? In my view, it's a reason to seek
more creative knowledge from within through the Spirit. It is how Wisdom beckons for us to come and join her in fashioning the Cosmos through our free agency.
Grant wrote:"the higher, more integrated Idea must itself be present as a precondition to all theorizing, which then leads the Idea back to itself at a higher level. In that sense, it is the evolved Idea which makes possible more expansive perception which, in turn, makes possible the same Idea at a higher level of holistic integration."
Can you elaborate on this, and maybe provide an example?
So you propose that natural laws evolve in response to the evolving realizations of each individual? I’m not sure that the participatory universe works quite like that. Evidently, our evolving realizations can imply dualism, but this doesn’t give the universe laws which make it dualistic. There are laws intrinsic to our experience that connect all experiences, which cannot be altered by our perceiving/thinking activity that may make ideations indicating otherwise. If natural laws did evolve in response to our thinking/perceiving activity, and these were allowed by the moral/metaphysical laws, then they would also be implications of moral/metaphysical laws, and would thereby just be what is established by the moral/metaphysical laws. The question of whether they evolve over time, or whether they are “always there” is a philosophical speculation that is hardly even worth pondering about as far as I can tell. All natural laws are reflections of what is required for phenomenal experience, and are only induced by the experiential agent insofar as they are required for their phenomenal experiencing. I don’t believe that there is anything superfluous beyond that.
To be clear, my proposition isn’t that natural laws directly correspond to moral/perceptual/metaphysical laws, but that these moral/perceptual/metaphysical laws cast a shadow on the natural world. And if I am misinterpreting your position, please let me know
I would really point to every paradigmatic shift since the birth of philosophy-science 2,500-3,000 years ago as examples. First, the shift in consciousness had to occur, in perception-cognition, before mathematical and scientific theorizing became possible. Consider this passage from Jean Gebser:
During the heyday of the Baroque era in the seventeenth century, an age which also attempted to get beyond the perspectival strictures of Renaissance space in the arts, there was a “downright frenzied forward thrust . . . in mathematics” of which Colerus speaks. The traditional and predominantly static geometry of measurement set down by Euclid is displaced, after a nearly two-thousand-year exclusive reign, by Descartes’ “analytic geometry” (1637), by Desargues’ “projective geometry” based on perception and illustration rather than on measurement (!) (1639), and by the “dynamic mathematics” (1638, 1687) of Galileo and Newton (see above p. 100). Projective geometry in particular engendered to a greater degree than the others the modern “non-Euclidian” geometries which brought into being the fourth dimension that Einstein introduced into physics in the form of “time.” These new mathematical concepts, moreover, were the foundation on which for the first time modern technology could be developed. Even bythemselves—and there are other parallel phenomena which are familiar to every mathematician—these facts are a clear indication of the “irruption of time” into mathematical thinking. They elicit a wealth of phenomena of which the foremost, the technologizing and four-dimensionalizing of our world, speak an unambiguous language.
Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin . Ohio University Press. Kindle Edition.
So we are speaking of collective transformations here, but of course this manifests through individual human consciousness as well. We could say there is a 'top-down' precipitation of higher cognitions (moral laws) which are met by human individuals from the 'bottom-up' and manifested concretely in the world, and then we observe the manifestations abstractly, i.e. we ignore our own collective and individual participation in their manifestation, and call them "natural laws". In the modern age, the latter were then extrapolated indefinitely into the past and into the future as entities existing entirely independent of the human soul and its moral valence. I agree, there is little point speculating abstractly about this too much - the key is to actually undertake a reunion between the realm of moral laws, which reside within the soul, and the realm of natural laws which we perceive outside of us. The extent to which these two realms are kept separate from one another, inner (moral) from outer (natural), is entirely a function of each individual's cognitive development - it is
not the same for everyone at any given time. We must abandon this modern abstract uniformitarianism in philosophy, science, art, and spirituality. That is what we are pointing to here. A path for each individual to actually undertake this reuniting of the 'opposites' which requires a sacrifice of abstraction - a death of the intellectual ego - to be born again from within as living thinking.