Federica wrote: ↑Fri Jul 01, 2022 4:58 pm
Similarly - and although I stopped eating meat about two years ago - I have not the least idea what you are talking about when you say that we have reached a point of evolution when eating animal meat does not help animals anymore.
Right, I'm not sure why I thought that would be comprehensible without any context... let me add some thoughts on that.
When we speak of evolution, we are really speaking of coarse matter returning to its more spiritual-ideal origins in a rhythmic, lawful way. The dormant Spirit imprisoned within matter yearns for its supersensible home. But if a rocket is ignited without any planning, there's no telling where it will go and land, what wreckage it will cause in the process. If a pot of water is put under a rocket flame, it will be burned up immediately into nothingness. Then what good came of its descent into matter? No focused, usable energy is worked free from the water in this way. Instead, the wise powers structured the physical-perceptual plane so that water (matter) can come to a gradual boil from fire (spirit) and release useful energy which eventually translates into higher development of spiritual understanding, aesthetic, and ethics - Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
A major issue for people today is that humanity is considered mostly separate from the natural order. We feel human beings are a really late addition in evolution, with a thought-capacity which frothed up from blind, instinctive nature and will return back to that nature. In the meantime, it is felt like this thinking is mostly inconsequential or even destructive (and it certainly can be the latter in its lower manifestations). But the reality is, human spiritual activity evolved from the natural order and is integral to it - we bring great harmony to the kingdoms of Nature through this activity. Without it, the rest of the kingdoms would wither away and die, i.e. become even coarser matter, rigidify, disintegrate and otherwise remain in a deep slumber. The Earth would eventually cease to exist.
The spiritual science behind this claim is pretty complex, as we would expect from any rigorous science, but if we adopt the ideal perspective, which really requires the inspired experiential 'inversion' spoken about on the other thread, these things become much more clear. Just like it's rather obvious to us that physical processes are needed to sustain and evolve life, it becomes obvious that it's actually the spiritual (ideal) processes, most of which still exist as the invisible context of ideal activity above us - the supersensible forces of nature and culture - which are in the driver's seat.
We often hear about "food for thought". Even from a secular perspective, we say food is needed for energy, energy is needed for brain activity, brain activity is needed for thinking. Then we usually stop and fail to recognize the simple fact that thinking is needed for all sorts of processes which order nature and culture and allow the evolutionary process to continue on. From the spiritual science perspective, we can go much deeper into it. The human organism is an alchemical laboratory which transmutes the form-constraining material into the life-giving spiritual, turns lead into gold. Every time we eat, we are in fact taking in material elements which can be spiritualized by us through Divine thinking, feeling, and will, and the more conscious we are of this inner nature and activity, the more effectively we carry out the spiritual alchemy.
OMA wrote:When you eat, learn to concentrate on your food by thinking you are communing with the whole universe. In this way the food will tell you its story, it will speak to you of the earth, the wind, the rain, the dew, the sun, the stars… Food is made up of particles and energies that come not only from the earth, but from the whole cosmos. Yes, elements from the cosmos have materialized in the form of flowers, vegetables, fruit. In reality, food materializes on earth in exactly the same way that children materialize in their mother’s womb. Originally, plants and fruit were spirits in space, but as we cannot work in the physical plane if we have no physical body, in order to act efficiently here on earth and to maintain life, it was necessary for these spirits to conform to the laws of matter by incarnating...
Humans eat, all creatures eat, but why? You will say that it is to receive energy. Yes, but is there not another reason? Everything we do does not have just one reason, one goal, and if we eat, it is not just to keep us alive and healthy... Look, what do worms do? They swallow earth and then reject it. By making it pass through them in this way, worms work the earth in order to aerate it, to enrich it, make it more fertile. Well, humans do just the same with food. On account of their psychic, spiritual faculties, they belong to a much higher degree of evolution to that of the matter they absorb, so by passing through them matter is enriched and refined. All creatures - plants, animals and human beings- eat, and by eating they transform the matter they absorb and impregnate it with elements that it did not have before. It is as if it was a duty for each of nature’s realms to absorb the matter of the lower realms in order to make it evolve. Cosmic Intelligence could doubtless have found other methods, but it has chosen this one: it has decided that, in order to live, each creature would absorb the matter of the realm below it, in order to pass it to the realm above it . That is what we do when we eat.
In reality, it is not just a question of passing matter through our stomach, but also through our lungs, our heart, our brain. It is not only by eating that people can improve matter, but by all their actions: by breathing, working, speaking, looking… You see how far humanity’s task reaches. That is why when, after their death, the matter of their bodies disintegrates and returns to the four elements -earth, water, air, fire - the particles that form it have become more alive, subtler, more expressive and will be used for other forms, other creations of better quality. Of course, it can happen that on the contrary these particles are degraded because of the animalistic or criminal life that the person has led and so they will be used only for crude creations.
In this way, the food chain is a magnificently Wise aspect of the natural order. But at a certain stage of evolution, an organism must not continue relying solely on higher beings to evolve, but must discover the impulses to evolve within itself, just as the infant must pass into adolescence and adulthood. This is what is known as the "Christ impulse" that Cleric referenced in his last comment. Particular animal forms are approaching this stage - their "I" must begin descending into the particular forms as it did for humans previously. Humans belonged to an archetypal group soul before becoming individuated, as the animals do today. Even over the last few millennia, we see a great transition from human identification with collectives to the identification with the individuated "I" within; to individual sovereignty. So now animals will not really gain in their evolution from being consumed by humans going forward, and we, in turn, will hamper our own evolution by absorbing more animalistic passions. Now, we longer need to sacrifice animals in religious ceremonies, factory farms, laboratories, etc., but sacrifice our inner animals which keep us chained to past stages of evolution through animalistic tendencies.
None of this should be taken as a 'corrective' to past cultural practices. This is a great error of recent times which has led and continues to lead to devastating consequences. Let's say I pull up to a red light and start making a right turn without looking. At the last second, out of the corner of my eye, I become aware of a car going through the intersection and slam on the brakes. Actually, this 'right brain' instinct becomes aware of the vehicle even before I see it physically, and kicks into gear. The goal of evolution is not to eliminate this vital instinct, but to make it
more conscious, to spiritualize it, to transmute it into the higher faculty of Intuition. Similarly, cultural institutions which evolved through nature are very important symbols for the Spirit. Whether we are speaking of genders, marriage, races, nationalities, economies, philosophies, etc., the goal isn't to eradicate these but to integrate them through living spiritual knowledge. We aren't sacrificing meat-eating because it was "wrong", but because we can take over its functions to do it even better now, i.e. more consciously, more spiritually.
Until we realize this simple 'inverted' fact, our attempts to forcibly and physically integrate the divisions, or end meat consumption, save the environment, etc., will actually bring about the opposite of their intended goals - further division, tribalization, alienation from Nature and other humans, and even slaughter on a mass scale. We saw examples of the latter in various 'socialist' movements of the 20th century. True spiritual alchemy is not about eliminating the natural or cultural distinctions, but
redeeming them through inner work. That is the rhythmic, gradual integration of our divisions through spiritual evolution, which doesn't only work on this flaw here or that flaw there at the surface of the rational intellect, but attempts to gain knowledge of their inner dynamics via living cognition and encompass them all holistically. Then we have a real foundation for shared human understanding and harmonized intentions and goals, born from living knowledge of who we were, we are, and are destined to become.
Owen Barfield wrote:There are two things that are noticeable about the modern psychology... the first is that the root, the subconscious root, of schizophrenia is increasingly being traced to the experience of what I will for the moment call "cut-offness". The second is that the experience is increasingly being regarded, not as one that is peculiar to the patient, but in a greater or less degree as one that is the predicament of humanity, or certainly Western humanity, as a whole.
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The clinically schizoid are simply the ones who are becoming most sharply aware of it. Thus, they speak of the personality, or the self, as being isolated, encapsulated, excluded, estranged, alienated. There are many different ways of putting it. But what the self of each of us feels isolated from, cut off from, by its encapsulation in the nakedly physical reality presented to it by the common sense of contemporary culture, is precisely its own existential source [the 'true Self'].
Sin and Madness, by Dr. Shirley Sugerman... argues, convincingly to my mind, that what is now conceived and felt as insanity can only be properly understood as the evolutionary metamorphosis of what was formerly conceived and felt as sin.
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But can there by sin without guilt? Paul Ricouer, in his book The Symbolism of Evil, observes, rightly I think, that a feeling of guilt is the fundamental experience of sin. If so, how can this contemporary madness, from which there is evidence that we all suffer, but about which we certainly do not feel guilty, have anything to do with sin? Perhaps because, although we do not feel guilty about the sin, we do feel guilty because of it.
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There is atmosphere of guilt. Take for instance the issue of racialism, the relation between the advanced and the so-called "backward nations", or between white and colored... what was until recently called "the white man's burden" was a burden of responsibility, not of guilt.
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People seem almost to go out of their way to find things to feel guilty about, or to encourage others to feel guilty about. I can think of two reasons in particular why it is bad... such confused feelings of guilt tend to beget paralysis rather than energy... when they do not beget paralysis, feelings of guilt tend to turn rather easily into feelings of hatred and contempt. We may feel a bit guilty ourselves, but we are very sure that a whole lot of other people are much more guilty, and probably ought to be destroyed.
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And just this darker side to the experience of guilt seems to be even more evident when the experience is collective rather than when it is the individual. 'All are responsible for all', said Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. A noble, a truly human sentiment - perhaps the only absolutely human sentiment there is... It is the irritation of guilt that turns it into the impulse to compel, into a determination to use every kind of violence, every device of indoctrination, in order to enforce on all a systematic equality that must entail a mechanical and inhuman uniformity.
