New topic split from 'concise criticism of analytic idealism' thread.

[Lou Gold]

So much of the warning contained in this dialogue I can recognize as relevant to me directly. The things I like to think about myself, the real motives behind usual behaviors, and for example the same (but worse) mental habits Ashvin has described about reasoning. In particular, it's by indulging in one of these that weeks ago I wrote something really insensitive here. I apologize to you, Lou, for those words...

I have zero recollection of it Federica. BTW, about thinking about yourself, me too! .

There's just so much in the vast in-here/out-there that we are bound to make errors and realize faults in living-and-overcoming our dissociated connectivity. I don't know if you've been following the recent youtubes of Mark Vernon but he's been pointing out that falling into the purgatory of soul cleansing is really a rising into greater awareness. May we all be blessed with good journeys.

[Federica]

So much of the warning contained in this dialogue I can recognize as relevant to me directly. The things I like to think about myself, the real motives behind usual behaviors, and for example the same (but worse) mental habits Ashvin has described about reasoning. In particular, it's by indulging in one of these that weeks ago I wrote something really insensitive here. I apologize to you, Lou, for those words...

I have zero recollection of it Federica. BTW, about thinking about yourself, me too! .

There's just so much in the vast in-here/out-there that we are bound to make errors and realize faults in living-and-overcoming our dissociated connectivity. I don't know if you've been following the recent youtubes of Mark Vernon but he's been pointing out that falling into the purgatory of soul cleansing is really a rising into greater awareness. May we all be blessed with good journeys.

Thank you, Lou.
I was spending quite some time on Youtube before joining this forum. Endless opportunities to get inspired! But now a burning need to take my journey more clearly into my own hands is compelling me to put youtube more or less on hold. The act of 'following' videos seems too comfortable and passive and I am more drawn to reading, reflecting, ways that invite more first-person engagement. This being said I am sure this too will evolve, so I have put Mark Vernon on my list, thanks!

[Lou Gold]

So much of the warning contained in this dialogue I can recognize as relevant to me directly. The things I like to think about myself, the real motives behind usual behaviors, and for example the same (but worse) mental habits Ashvin has described about reasoning. In particular, it's by indulging in one of these that weeks ago I wrote something really insensitive here. I apologize to you, Lou, for those words...

I have zero recollection of it Federica. BTW, about thinking about yourself, me too! .

There's just so much in the vast in-here/out-there that we are bound to make errors and realize faults in living-and-overcoming our dissociated connectivity. I don't know if you've been following the recent youtubes of Mark Vernon but he's been pointing out that falling into the purgatory of soul cleansing is really a rising into greater awareness. May we all be blessed with good journeys.

Thank you, Lou.
I was spending quite some time on Youtube before joining this forum. Endless opportunities to get inspired! But now a burning need to take my journey more clearly into my own hands is compelling me to put youtube more or less on hold. The act of 'following' videos seems too comfortable and passive and I am more drawn to reading, reflecting, ways that invite more first-person engagement. This being said I am sure this too will evolve, so I have put Mark Vernon on my list, thanks!

No problem Federica. Thank you for your concern.

I also spend little time with videos but I do check the ones Shu posts to the forum. The Mark Vernon views on Purgatory are associated with his understanding of Dante. I've only dipped in, but have found the rising into awareness as a purging process as intriguing.

[Federica]

...

Ashvin,

Once again thank you for the insightful comments. The way you are able to seamlessly intertwine the various themes and even threads is amazing. I get that you might have been doing so all the time, it just touches me more now, the connection of seemingly separate flows of ideas with each other.


To reinforce this impression, here's an excerpt from where I am in PoF, which quite punctually addresses the philosophical stance BK has adopted with his bodily boundary. This discussion on BK's model clearly wasn't an aside from the preceding discussions but a concrete illustration of the dualistic approach described in the 'Theory of Freedom' as one of the pitfalls. Back then it was already an expected one...

So far as my perception goes, I am, in the first instance, confined within the limits bounded by my skin. But all that is contained within the skin belongs to the cosmos as a whole. Hence, for a relation to subsist between my organism and an object external to me, it is by no means necessary that something of the object should slip into me, or make an impression on my mind, like a signet ring on wax. The question, How do I gain knowledge of that tree ten feet away from me, is utterly misleading. It springs from the view that the boundaries of my body are absolute barriers, through which information about external things filters into me. The forces which are active within my body are the same as those which exist outside. I am, therefore, really identical with the objects; not, however, I in so far as I am subject of perception, but I in so far as I am a part within the universal cosmic process. The percept of the tree belongs to the same whole as my Self. The universal cosmic process produces alike, here the percept of the tree, and there the percept of my Self.

[AshvinP]

...

Ashvin,

Once again thank you for the insightful comments. The way you are able to seamlessly intertwine the various themes and even threads is amazing. I get that you might have been doing so all the time, it just touches me more now, the connection of seemingly separate flows of ideas with each other.


To reinforce this impression, here's an excerpt from where I am in PoF, which quite punctually addresses the philosophical stance BK has adopted with his bodily boundary. This discussion on BK's model clearly wasn't an aside from the preceding discussions but a concrete illustration of the dualistic approach described in the 'Theory of Freedom' as one of the pitfalls. Back then it was already an expected one...

So far as my perception goes, I am, in the first instance, confined within the limits bounded by my skin. But all that is contained within the skin belongs to the cosmos as a whole. Hence, for a relation to subsist between my organism and an object external to me, it is by no means necessary that something of the object should slip into me, or make an impression on my mind, like a signet ring on wax. The question, How do I gain knowledge of that tree ten feet away from me, is utterly misleading. It springs from the view that the boundaries of my body are absolute barriers, through which information about external things filters into me. The forces which are active within my body are the same as those which exist outside. I am, therefore, really identical with the objects; not, however, I in so far as I am subject of perception, but I in so far as I am a part within the universal cosmic process. The percept of the tree belongs to the same whole as my Self. The universal cosmic process produces alike, here the percept of the tree, and there the percept of my Self.

It's my pleasure! Really there aren't too many different variables at play - it's the few same archetypal patterns of W-F-T for the modern age which manifest in various forms of arguments and approaches. Soon you will be connecting these threads together as well, even more than you already are. Imaginative meditative exercises will greatly help.

I would also take this opportunity to say, if we are following the Logic of concepts and imaginations precipitating from the higher worlds, then we can't judge any particular individual thinker too negatively. I am not intending to say, "wow BK is so silly for making these logical errors" or anything similar. In some sense, every individual lives through these errors at various stages of their life. They are very subtle and difficult to notice and address. We are dealing with transpersonal forces which shape our lives almost entirely beneath the surface of the conscious intellect. But, of course, someone else's errors can be great lessons for those of us who notice them or have them brought to our attention, even if that person hasn't had the opportunity or inclination to discover them yet. That is mostly the way these things go, from what I can tell so far - those of us fortunate enough to be watching on the 'sidelines' can get the most value from what the major league players are doing and not doing, thinking and not thinking, according to their own Karma which placed them in such problematically entrenched public-facing positions.

[Federica]

I would also take this opportunity to say, if we are following the Logic of concepts and imaginations precipitating from the higher worlds, then we can't judge any particular individual thinker too negatively. I am not intending to say, "wow BK is so silly for making these logical errors" or anything similar. In some sense, every individual lives through these errors at various stages of their life. They are very subtle and difficult to notice and address. We are dealing with transpersonal forces which shape our lives almost entirely beneath the surface of the conscious intellect.

Yes. As much as I can I try to counterbalance and devils advocate my judgments, and it never crossed my mind that BK was silly. But your remark makes me wonder how to find the fine balance between "the forces that shape our life almost entirely" and your motto "Do not stop on any steps".
To Lou you said that "it's our moral obligation to Nature, and to the Cosmic organism as a whole, to begin transforming that over this current incarnation, wherever we happen to be in life", not that Karma is what it is?

[AshvinP]

I would also take this opportunity to say, if we are following the Logic of concepts and imaginations precipitating from the higher worlds, then we can't judge any particular individual thinker too negatively. I am not intending to say, "wow BK is so silly for making these logical errors" or anything similar. In some sense, every individual lives through these errors at various stages of their life. They are very subtle and difficult to notice and address. We are dealing with transpersonal forces which shape our lives almost entirely beneath the surface of the conscious intellect.

Yes. As much as I can I try to counterbalance and devils advocate my judgments, and it never crossed my mind that BK was silly. But your remark makes me wonder how to find the fine balance between "the forces that shape our life almost entirely" and your motto "Do not stop on any steps".
To Lou you said that "it's our moral obligation to Nature, and to the Cosmic organism as a whole, to begin transforming that over this current incarnation, wherever we happen to be in life", not that Karma is what it is?

Federica,

It's by becoming more conscious of these subconscious forces that we begin taking over more and more control of our inner activity, starting with our thinking. The latter is the first domain of inner human life that is crossing the threshold into genuine creativity and spiritual freedom, but for that to manifest we must put the rational intellect into gracious and loving service of higher Ideas - Imaginations, Inspirations, Intuitions - and their higher Logic. It is through the Logos that we will find the impulse needed to knowingly work off our Karma and escape the straightjacket of physical destiny (although this will certainly take multiple lifetimes, we can make significant progress in our current one). Otherwise, our naturally evolving spiritual freedom will be appropriated by lower subconscious forces and we will feel the intensification of the spiritual within the physical as an oppressive force, like blind will or mindless matter/energy, an external compulsion which breeds cynicism and resentment within us, and we already see a great deal of that occurring now. Even in Steiner's time 100+ years ago, these things were very evident. Consider the following passage:

Now, for someone who is able to see these things in their proper light, the matter appears as follows. If you see a horse-drawn vehicle, a cab with a horse in front, the horse is drawing the cab. You will, of course, say that the driver is sitting on the box and guiding the horse with the reins. But if you ignore the driver, you will find it interesting to study what goes on in the horse to make it draw the cab; you can go into every detail of how the horse sets about drawing the cab, if you leave aside the fact that it is given its intention by the cab driver.

This is the actual basis of Darwinian theories; one simply leaves aside the driver, saying it is an old superstition, a prejudice, to say that the driver is guiding the horse. The horse is drawing the cab, anyone can see that, for the horse is in front. Darwinian theory is entirely based on this kind of logic. Being thus biased, it has, of course, brought to light some excellent truths which are of the first magnitude. But it blocks all possibility of a real overview. Countless scientific facts suffer at the empirical level from the fact that people overlook the driver. They speak of cause and effect; but they seek the cause for the movement of the cab in the horse, considering this to be a great advance. People fail to realize that this type of confusion between horse and driver — such ‘horse theories’, if you will forgive my putting it bluntly — exists right, left and centre in modern science. These theories cannot be proved wrong, just as it is not wrong to say the horse draws the cab. This is quite correct, but true and false in the outer sense is not the issue.
...
Something else has to be considered when we speak of human evolution. It is that the spirits of darkness have power mainly over the rational mind and intellect. They cannot get hold of the emotions, nor the will and, above all, not the will impulses. This touches on a profound and most significant law of reality. You have all of you, though to a different degree, reached a sufficiently respectable age for it to be fair to say you have lived several decades, or two or three decades at least. In the last decades we have seen a wide variety of social efforts, many supported by press journalism, some also by book journalism, but very few based on real knowledge and on the facts. We have seen strange forms of social and political life evolve in Europe and America. Yet, strangely, we find in all these things the ideas belonging to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, but not the emotions, nor the will impulses. This is strange indeed... The will moves much more slowly in human evolution than do ideas. Please take this as a highly significant truth: the will moves much more slowly than do thoughts...

It is entirely due to this that something became possible in the nineteenth century which had not been possible in any previous century. Superficial historians may well disagree, but it is pointless to go against it. What I mean is this: never before in the historical epochs of human evolution did the intellect, or acumen, positively intervene in life. Go back to the slave rebellions in ancient Rome; the slaves were essentially aroused by rancour, by will impulses. In the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century this is different. Modern social democracy does not compare, historically speaking, with the old slave rebellions; it is something entirely different, born out of theories produced by Lassalle, 5 but mainly by Karl Marx, 6 including his theory of the class struggle. A purely critical element, purely theoretical, based on ideas, set people going and made them into agitators. This was because the people who took up Marxism and became agitators still had the will impulses of the 1840s. They had not been able to catch up as far as the will was concerned. This discrepancy in will had the effect that, under the guidance of certain powers, a purely intellectual movement generated agitation among the masses.

So that is what happens when living imaginative knowledge of the higher worlds is not sought after - people live with their will and thinking entirely in the past, and the rational intellect becomes the deciding factor. That means they are entirely unfree, their dry concepts of "justice", "freedom", "equality", and the like impelled by selfish and mechanistic forces living within and unknown to them. The solution is to turn towards the future with our thinking and will, through the force of imaginative Logic which can probe the inner depths of soul and bring these shadowy forces into the Light. That is how we can participate in the redemptive freeing of our thinking, feeling, and willing.

Here's a simple test - light a candle and feel how it connects with your soul. Then pull up a picture or video of a candle and see the difference. Our thinking has reached the stage where it can detach the appearances from Nature for purpose of Culture, but in the process these appearances become lifeless, without connection to our soul. But the ever-evolving story doesn't end there. The evolved faculty of Imagination is how we breathe new life into these appearances from within. We aren't forsaking Culture for a return to Nature, but integrating them through the Spirit from which they both arise and which is to be found within each human individual. That is how we set on the path to becoming spiritually creative and free beings.

When we use language [symbolically], we bring it about of our own free will that an appearance means something other than itself... that a manifest 'means' an unmanifest. We start with an idol, and we ourselves turn the idol into representation... we use the phenomenon as a 'name' for what is not phenomenal... As consciousness develops into self-consciousness, the remembered phenomena become detached or liberated from their original [meanings] and so, as images, are in some measure at man's disposal... they are at the disposal of his imagination to employ as it chooses. If it chooses to impart its own meaning, it is doing... with the remembered phenomena what their Creator once did with the 'external appearances' themselves. Thus there is a real analogy between [symbolical] usage [of language] and original participation [in the creation of 'external appearances']... there is a valid analogy if, but only if, we admit that, in the course of the earth's history, something like a Divine Word has been gradually clothing itself with the humanity it first gradually created - so that what was first spoken by God may eventually be respoken by man.
- Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957)

[Lou Gold]

I would also take this opportunity to say, if we are following the Logic of concepts and imaginations precipitating from the higher worlds, then we can't judge any particular individual thinker too negatively. I am not intending to say, "wow BK is so silly for making these logical errors" or anything similar. In some sense, every individual lives through these errors at various stages of their life. They are very subtle and difficult to notice and address. We are dealing with transpersonal forces which shape our lives almost entirely beneath the surface of the conscious intellect.

Yes. As much as I can I try to counterbalance and devils advocate my judgments, and it never crossed my mind that BK was silly. But your remark makes me wonder how to find the fine balance between "the forces that shape our life almost entirely" and your motto "Do not stop on any steps".
To Lou you said that "it's our moral obligation to Nature, and to the Cosmic organism as a whole, to begin transforming that over this current incarnation, wherever we happen to be in life", not that Karma is what it is?

Federica, I'm finding your dialogue with Ashvin as a very rich addition to this forum. It constantly tempts me to chime in but I'm going to withhold my habit for now in favor of seeing where you and Ashvin wll take it. In the meantime, my compliments to all.

Ashvin, Is your motto (signature) a quote from Steiner, or where?

[AshvinP]

I would also take this opportunity to say, if we are following the Logic of concepts and imaginations precipitating from the higher worlds, then we can't judge any particular individual thinker too negatively. I am not intending to say, "wow BK is so silly for making these logical errors" or anything similar. In some sense, every individual lives through these errors at various stages of their life. They are very subtle and difficult to notice and address. We are dealing with transpersonal forces which shape our lives almost entirely beneath the surface of the conscious intellect.

Yes. As much as I can I try to counterbalance and devils advocate my judgments, and it never crossed my mind that BK was silly. But your remark makes me wonder how to find the fine balance between "the forces that shape our life almost entirely" and your motto "Do not stop on any steps".
To Lou you said that "it's our moral obligation to Nature, and to the Cosmic organism as a whole, to begin transforming that over this current incarnation, wherever we happen to be in life", not that Karma is what it is?

Federica, I'm finding your dialogue with Ashvin as a very rich addition to this forum. It constantly tempts me to chime in but I'm going to withhold my habit for now in favor of seeing where you and Ashvin wll take it. In the meantime, my compliments to all.

Ashvin, Is your motto (signature) a quote from Steiner, or where?

Thanks, Lou. The motto is an esoteric teaching Steiner mentions in a lesson, but it isn't attributed to anyone specifically.

Let me add some more thoughts on Federica's question, since it's such a massive and important topic for our time. It is the polar relation of Necessity (Karma - Earth) and Freedom (Heaven), which is simply another manifestation of that between Unconsciousness and Consciousness, Differentiation and Integration, Willing (or Perceiving) and Thinking. A very interesting verse in scripture to contemplate is, "I have not come to abolish the Law or Prophets, but to fulfill them." The Law associates with morality given from without as instincts, impulses, traditions, etc., while the Christ impulse is that of moral conscience from within, born of living spiritual knowledge. The latter allows the continuation of the former but, instead of as external compulsions, as inner impulse of the individual agency in complete freedom.

It is really helpful here to consider what we call animal and human 'instincts' as nothing other than Divine Ideas which subconsciously direct our behavior. That is what Steiner refers to when he comments that the 'spirits of darkness' are only operative in thinking now, but not in our emotions and will impulses. It's yet another inversion of the common modern way of understanding these things - our lower bodily nature is associated with lofty Divine beings, while our upper head nature (physical intellect) is more associated with lower Earthly forces, i.e. spirits of darkness. Yet as the impulse to freedom unfolds, if the lower instincts remain unconscious, then they begin to feel as external forces compelling and oppressing us. That is the basis of why moderns view the unconscious as some absolutely dark realm, blind will, mindless matter, nothingness, emptiness, etc. It is actually a realm filled with luminous and supra-moral Beings, but they appear 'dark' due to our own lack of living consciousness.

Why is this inversion horizon from Necessity to Freedom called the "Christ impulse"? We don't need to rely on any dogma for this, and actually this is quite unknown to mainstream religious tradition. They sense it only vaguely, buried beneath the piles of abstract doctrines which accrued mostly post-Reformation. It's interesting to see just how many 'inversions' are actually recounted in scripture itself, without any modern dogmas.


Christ as a Cosmic Being, the Divine Word, incarnates as a 'puny' human being of flesh and blood.

The great Sun-Spirit unites himself with the Earth evolution.

He turns water into wine.

He says, "the last shall be first and the first shall be last".

He says, "That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him."

"He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

“To what shall we liken the kingdom of God? Or with what parable shall we picture it? It is like a mustard seed which, when it is sown on the ground, is smaller than all the seeds on earth; but when it is sown, it grows up and becomes greater than all herbs, and shoots out large branches, so that the birds of the air may nest under its shade.”

He tells people to 'love your enemies' and 'turn the other cheek'.

Christ Jesus triumphally rides into Jerusalem as the 'King of the Jews', the Messiah, on a donkey, a jackass (when everyone would be expecting a white horse).

Those are just a few of many examples littered throughout the Gospels. The epistles of St. Paul also stress the inversion horizon often - "Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men."

Other thinkers like Jean Gebser have located this momentous time as that in which the Space-consciousness begins its inversion into Time-consciousness, the latter irrupting much more fully in our own time, as reflected by many philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic developments (such as GR and QM). (related to that, via Imaginative cognition, we can also begin to behold Memory more in spatial configuration, as depicted in movies like Interstellar, except it's not a physical occurrence of course).

The new mutation of consciousness, on the other hand, as a consequence of arationality, receives its decisive stamp from the manifest perceptual emergence of the spiritual... Two apocryphal statements of Christian doctrine clarify in their way what is meant here: “This world is a bridge, cross it but do not make of it your dwelling place,” and “I have chosen you before the earth began.” They point to the spiritual origin prior to all spatio-temporal materialization. We may regard such materialization as a bridge that makes possible the merging or coalescence, the concrescere of origin and the present. The great church father Irenaeus presumably had these sayings in mind when he stated: “Blessed is he who was before the coming of man.” We have seen him; he revealed himself in space and time. In his departure he was beheld by his disciples in his transparency, a transparency appropriate only to the spiritual origin (if anything can be appropriated to it), the transparency which a time-free and ego-free person can presentiate in the most fortunate certainty of life. The grand and painful path of consciousness emergence, or, more appropriately, the unfolding and intensification of consciousness, manifests itself as an increasingly intense luminescence of the spiritual in man.

- Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin

So we are living in an epoch when the fruits of the Christ impulse can really manifest themselves and humanity can transmute outer Divine necessity into inner spiritual freedom. But for this, we must realize that we are "in the world, but not of the world". The materialistic, reductionistic, selfish ways of the modern world must be flipped on their head, inverted within our own consciousness. For the worldly human, the pole of Willing service and faithfulness to God cannot coexist with the pole of Thinking freedom of soul and spirit. It is an irresolvable paradox. For the human who lives with his consciousness in higher worlds, these two are naturally and inextricably linked, One eternally giving rise to the Other in their Cosmic dance. "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come."

[Lou Gold]

Yes. As much as I can I try to counterbalance and devils advocate my judgments, and it never crossed my mind that BK was silly. But your remark makes me wonder how to find the fine balance between "the forces that shape our life almost entirely" and your motto "Do not stop on any steps".
To Lou you said that "it's our moral obligation to Nature, and to the Cosmic organism as a whole, to begin transforming that over this current incarnation, wherever we happen to be in life", not that Karma is what it is?

Federica, I'm finding your dialogue with Ashvin as a very rich addition to this forum. It constantly tempts me to chime in but I'm going to withhold my habit for now in favor of seeing where you and Ashvin wll take it. In the meantime, my compliments to all.

Ashvin, Is your motto (signature) a quote from Steiner, or where?

Thanks, Lou. The motto is an esoteric teaching Steiner mentions in a lesson, but it isn't attributed to anyone specifically.

Again, I'd like to stay clear of hitchhiking onto your dialogue with Fredricka but perhaps you can indulge me in adding one question to your list -- does your motto apply to thinking?