Whirlpool's core/first motion

[Federica]

Right, but let's always remember we are those "people". If we feel that we aren't conditioned by our gender, race, or nationality, then we are simply keeping that influence subconscious (and it's not easy to bring it to consciousness). At the end of the day, we are speaking of the nation as Idea, and as Steiner mentioned in the linked lecture, Ideas don't just hang in the air, but belong to ideational beings. They are experienced from the first-person perspective of such beings, not unlike we experience our own ideas from our first-person perspective. And there are important goals for humanity which are accomplished by such beings ideating national currents of willing, feeling, thinking. Yet, by becoming more conscious of these beings and their ideational currents, we also decondition from them. It's always good to view another human being, first and foremost, as an image of the universal Spirit, transcending any transient identifications, but we don't get a complete understanding of the human individual in that way. For the latter, we must also try to discern these nested layers of influence, of course without any prejudice or moral judgment.
...

It's really being a struggle for me to get across this point! Earlier in this thread, it made me look like I was mystical, and now, like I see myself as a ghost floating around without gender and nationality. Of course I am aware that these qualities are operating in me, and I wouldn’t say that I hope or expect to decondition from higher beings by becoming more conscious of them and their ideational currents. If I ever become more conscious in that way, would I see it as a deconditioning? I hope not...

The reason I mention it this way is because, in my own case, I have often found myself looking out at people and the world and wondering, "how could they be so silly and ignorant as to become radically nationalistic, racialistic, decriers of the 'evil patriarchy', etc". We can also connect it with what we find often on these forums and the need to move through the Zodiac of world-outlooks - "how is this guy so ignorant as to still be a materialist (or an analytic idealist)!" It's hard not to do that these days when so many people are content to live their lives like ostriches with their heads in the sand. What I try to do lately is immediately sense how that radicalism may also live within me, only buried deep within the subconscious. Just like the 'ordinary men', I could even commit crimes against humanity given the right circumstances and a lack of living, i.e. conscious, connection with higher Ideal-Beings.
...

Ashvin,

Your last comments here have prompted me to rethink the whole idea one more time and this is how I see it at this point. There seems to be a few different things mixed up here. One is the Ideas that separate people nationwise, or groupwise through feelings. This feeling aspect is the piece I was missing, that I gathered from the lecture. The ideational beings create national currents of feeling (not of willing or thinking, as I understand it) and acknowledging these does not prevent us from considering ourselves a ‘citizen of the world’ at the same time, by virtue of sharing equivalent thinking potential. A very different thing happens when one lets that group feeling ‘dominate in the worst possible way’. When ‘people feel themselves as only belonging to a certain group, all kinds of conflicts arise’. And that's the problem: when some people - and I would argue, we are not those people - find themselves going all the way down that road, to the point of creating great suffering or committing crimes. They behave under the unconscious command of a group current of feeling, distorted and taken to the extreme. They don’t take the way of freedom, they succumb to the way of karma.


Here I understand that the space of feelings, because it lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, is the balancing factor that could weigh us down the karma way or lift us up the freedom way. The threshold between conscious and unconscious is the pivot, and we can improve the balancing of our whole 'feeling space' by transforming it through thinking. Both ordinary and imaginative thinking should help, by introspection and concentration. Here below I have made an attempt to illustrate this process. Thinking is the fully conscious activity that can bring all feelings closer to center, rather than drag them over as much as possible on the conscious side. When this happens, conscious feelings are de-intellectualized, brightened, attuned to one another in the center. The heart-felt ones can move towards the center, while other ones won’t make it and will dissolve. On the other end, unconscious feelings will be either dropped, or lightened, and connected with the heartfelt ones around the center, as they are brought into awareness.


https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHoy91Nas/view

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHpPuwixY/view

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHpBXX_fM/view


With the sketches, I have tried to convey a sense that it’s less about dragging all feelings on the conscious side (the end balance would be off) and more about concentrating them all within the freedom zone. Not only unconscious, but also conscious feelings need thourough ‘plumbing’ review, or rework. If we do that effort, we end up in sketch 2. We have not affected the subconscious yet, hence we might be out of balance for that reason, but still better off, compared to a perfect balance with highly polarized masses in the feeling space. In sketch 3 the improvement has continued, with some more efforts to bring both sides to center, through thinking. Not all that matters is accouted for in these images, I know, and of course they look like, and are, an intellectual visualization. Still I have tried to maintain connection with how these ideas feel in my heart (with the exception of the third one, which can't be personal observation for the part of the imaginative thinking action on unconscious feelings.)


Done this side inquiry on feelings, triggered by the Steiner lecture, I want to go back to the initial question of the Ideas that separate people in groups, such as for example nations, or, as another example, the group of those who hold a materialistic position. Keeping in mind that these ideas, or positions, can become ingrained in the ego through feelings to an extreme extent, we could distinguish two ways to hold them.


One way is to adopt an idea as a transient movement. At a certain time, in relation to certain occurrences, we adopt the position by primarily thinking, by reasoning. We make a little place for it in our ego-space, we carry it with us, until it possibly becomes unfitting, and we leave it. In the meantime, we have not merged in feeling with the position. For example, a while ago I read the popular book ‘The power of now'. Upon reading it, my position was ‘He’s right! Let’s wake up!’ Later my opinion changed. I could change it easily because I had not let the position become much entangled with feelings and take over that space. It was primarily a matter of reasoning. I had not used it to represent or replace my identity. An opposite way would be when a position is adopted as if it was a transplant in our mental and emotional flesh, through merger with feelings. Then we become identified with it, and the feelings elicited, conscious and unconscious, could become dangerous, if negative or negatively wired, for example entitlement, pride, superiority, blind submission to group, or else. Here it’s clear that what’s dangerous is not the position, or idea, in itself, but the deep merging of it with negative or distorted feelings. It's a different story when we cultivate and merge our ideas with love, gratitude and other gracious feelings, like along the path of transformative thinking. Then it's a conscious deepening of the ideas in virtuous feelings, not a free fall into the agitations of the obscure swirls of feeling.


So if someone tells me that they love The power of now, they have adopted those ideas, even went to an Eckart Tolle retreat, or that they are materialist, it’s not hard for me to consider that they are not silly. It is actually extremely easy. There are so many variables, pre-conditions, exposures, karma, as you would say, to explain our transient opinions. On the contrary, let’s say they got mega tattoos of Eckart’s face all over their body, or they signal in some other way that they have entirely merged the position within their feeling space (which also makes them fully ready to act upon that activated feeling substance) In this case of radical stance and radicalized behavior - ‘radical’ here in a very different sense compared to how I used the word about you recently, I’m following your use here - I would allow myself against your advise to think that I am more advanced than that. Again, it’s not the position in itself that I’m judging. It’s instead because the position has been locked into place through merger with feelings, often independently from reason.


Indeed, I would consider that I'm not making the same mistake they are making, however there would be no triumph in that. No sense of deserving better. Partly because, after all, I could be in a similar stance in respect to some other ideas, stuck in unconscious feelings in ways I don’t realize. But more importantly, because I know that they are doing their best with what they have. Even the most abject criminals, as disturbing as this thought may be, are in certain sense doing their best, dealing with life and what they have access to in their life. Could this be the piece that you would refuse? But if you do, then you are forced to imagine yourself as a war criminal, to ward off the third-person perspective. I ward it off in a different way. That is to say, I could consider myself more advanced than others in some given area. However the reason I have worked my way to that point is that I was lucky to benefit from enough positive conditions, or karma, to support me. I feel grateful, hence responsible, because I am fully aware I have found myself in favorable conditions all along. I have not created these conditions.


From here, I could then say ‘Had I not received such help I could have become a war criminal’ but this doesn't help much, fantasizing on what could have happened. Neither helps the thought ‘I could become that tomorrow’. It remains a theoretical thought. Let’s face it, I am not a war criminal, and I’ll never be. So instead of picturing myself as such, I prefer to acknowledge the struggles of others, as they face their karma and their life situations. It’s a more real approach, I think. Sensing that I have unconscious tendencies that could make me a war criminal is abstract and improbable. But that a real war criminal has acted under certain conditions, certain karma, and was conducted by unconscious emotions and forces towards certain behaviors sounds more like a fact to my ear.
This view is also an opening to make room in our heart for forgiveness to happen, should the situation arise. If we instead try to picture ourselves, and anyone else, as potential criminals who happen to be virtuous by accident, then I don’t even get what the meaning of forgiveness could be. Few people here must be as lost in the Bible as I am, however didn’t Jesus say something about criminal behavior and forgiveness that could fit well here? Anyway, I am perplexed, when I read that you try to sense the criminal potential in yourself. In the meantime, the reality is that you are offering help to people on this forum that could let them change their condition, transform their ideas, just as you did for yourself. Why not consider that you only can do that from your position of being a little more advanced than them, in that given domain?


Lastly, this view also frees us from aggravating our feeling space with disappointment or sadness, about the people who keep their head stuck in the sand. Letting them take the driver seat in our feeling space so they can instill disappointment in it, won’t change the reality for them in any positive way. However It does change it for us, in a negative one. If we instead consider that those people are navigating life at the best they can, it’s easier and more joyful to become a living positive condition in their life, maybe the exact one they were missing in order to improve next time. Conversely, if we say “we are those people” then we paradoxically give more way to karma, hence we become somehow justified in, and prompted to, the feeling of disappointment for instance, when we see that karma, again, is keeping their head down under the sand.

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[AshvinP]

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHoy91Nas/view

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHpPuwixY/view

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHpBXX_fM/view

Wow, these are fantastic, Federica, thank you!

There is of course a lot to unpack in your response and sketches, and I will get to some response as soon as possible, but I wanted to first really thank you for the imaginative effort here. Perhaps it will even inspire some others to weigh in besides Cleric, yourself, and me!

[idlecuriosity]

Good and evil are things we do partly choose. For example, we could easily end up making more progress if we forced certain ways of thinking on people in some sense; But I think we abstain from this in our knowing of right from wrong. One of my favourite characters is an evil bandit in a story I peruse often who does really bad things but is incredibly spiritual and says a lot of things that wouldn't be out of place here, he is not a favourite because I think he is a good person either. On the flipside, the disruption he causes wouldn't have large enough ripples to stop humans from evolving further later down the line, though many die at the hands of his small ragtag group. The important part is that harmony is achieved in the end, what we do with the things that guide us or the parts of our root we guide ourselves with is mostly a matter of each of us choosing (speaking spiritually I should instead say it's a root chakra choice.)

This said, it leaves me with a question for Ashvin, you're a lawyer aren't you? How does your spiritual perspective influence your dealing with crime? Are you prosecution or defense most often? (assuming it is that type of law you're in)

[AshvinP]

On the contrary, let’s say they got mega tattoos of Eckart’s face all over their body, or they signal in some other way that they have entirely merged the position within their feeling space (which also makes them fully ready to act upon that activated feeling substance) In this case of radical stance and radicalized behavior - ‘radical’ here in a very different sense compared to how I used the word about you recently, I’m following your use here - I would allow myself against your advise to think that I am more advanced than that. Again, it’s not the position in itself that I’m judging. It’s instead because the position has been locked into place through merger with feelings, often independently from reason.


Indeed, I would consider that I'm not making the same mistake they are making, however there would be no triumph in that. No sense of deserving better. Partly because, after all, I could be in a similar stance in respect to some other ideas, stuck in unconscious feelings in ways I don’t realize. But more importantly, because I know that they are doing their best with what they have. Even the most abject criminals, as disturbing as this thought may be, are in certain sense doing their best, dealing with life and what they have access to in their life. Could this be the piece that you would refuse? But if you do, then you are forced to imagine yourself as a war criminal, to ward off the third-person perspective. I ward it off in a different way. That is to say, I could consider myself more advanced than others in some given area. However the reason I have worked my way to that point is that I was lucky to benefit from enough positive conditions, or karma, to support me. I feel grateful, hence responsible, because I am fully aware I have found myself in favorable conditions all along. I have not created these conditions.


From here, I could then say ‘Had I not received such help I could have become a war criminal’ but this doesn't help much, fantasizing on what could have happened. Neither helps the thought ‘I could become that tomorrow’. It remains a theoretical thought. Let’s face it, I am not a war criminal, and I’ll never be. So instead of picturing myself as such, I prefer to acknowledge the struggles of others, as they face their karma and their life situations. It’s a more real approach, I think. Sensing that I have unconscious tendencies that could make me a war criminal is abstract and improbable. But that a real war criminal has acted under certain conditions, certain karma, and was conducted by unconscious emotions and forces towards certain behaviors sounds more like a fact to my ear.

This view is also an opening to make room in our heart for forgiveness to happen, should the situation arise. If we instead try to picture ourselves, and anyone else, as potential criminals who happen to be virtuous by accident, then I don’t even get what the meaning of forgiveness could be. Few people here must be as lost in the Bible as I am, however didn’t Jesus say something about criminal behavior and forgiveness that could fit well here? Anyway, I am perplexed, when I read that you try to sense the criminal potential in yourself. In the meantime, the reality is that you are offering help to people on this forum that could let them change their condition, transform their ideas, just as you did for yourself. Why not consider that you only can do that from your position of being a little more advanced than them, in that given domain?


Lastly, this view also frees us from aggravating our feeling space with disappointment or sadness, about the people who keep their head stuck in the sand. Letting them take the driver seat in our feeling space so they can instill disappointment in it, won’t change the reality for them in any positive way. However It does change it for us, in a negative one. If we instead consider that those people are navigating life at the best they can, it’s easier and more joyful to become a living positive condition in their life, maybe the exact one they were missing in order to improve next time. Conversely, if we say “we are those people” then we paradoxically give more way to karma, hence we become somehow justified in, and prompted to, the feeling of disappointment for instance, when we see that karma, again, is keeping their head down under the sand.

Although I know the entire post is related, I want to begin with this 2nd half. It is a more nuanced discussion, much less amenable to intellectual analysis, but very important. I think we are on the same page for a lot of things you mention above. To be clear, in no way I am saying we shouldn't exercise critical judgment of various ideologies working through the world or try to factor in and address people as specific personalities who are expressing those ideologies. All of those things should be done. Those things should be done with an aim to understanding them better and better speaking to the questions which may be underlying the questions/comments/views they have. But this does not have to be independent of understanding ourselves better and remaining critical of when we are quick to give ourselves praise for good qualities and to disclaim bad qualities. I am reminded of when I was in college and following my college football team - when they won, everyone says "we did it!", but when we lost, everyone says, "man they really blew it!"

This is the natural tendency in our age and we shouldn't underestimate how deep it runs within us. Since you have related this to Karma, we should understand that the working off of all our Karma would mean the end of the birth-death-rebirth cycle. It would mean complete continuity of consciousness so that we can truly count ourselves amongst the Gods in Heaven. Clearly most people have a long way to go before this happens. Every sense-impression we have ever taken in for the benefit of our Earthly progression, over all our previous incarnations, is a Karmic debt which needs to be balanced. This is where the idea of Christian faith/grace is extremely important - we will never work all those debts off by our own efforts alone. We can certainly shift our 'balance sheet' to become net creditors, so to speak, but we need the grace of the Gods, the forgiveness of debts, to attain a state without any debts remaining. To be honest, this is something I also struggle with on the path, since there is so much emphasis on self-determination through our own higher thinking efforts. It is hard to imagine what can be gained from a sense of 'learned helplessness', or the 'total depravity' of Christian doctrine. Here is the way I think about it currently.

It's not about unjustly condemning ourselves, belittling our achievements, dwelling on the past, or anything similar. It's only about reorienting our perspective from the physical to the spiritual, from the transient to the eternal. From the latter perspective, we are not very "advanced" at all and we are certainly not beyond the darkest horizons of evil. There have been been no shortage of brilliant thinkers, with healthy feelings, strong will, and opportunities to influence the world for the better. But it's precisely in these times when egoism creeps in and 'utopian' endeavors ensue, whether on a large scale or within our own household. We may start seeking a spiritualization of our physical nature which we have not yet earned; a right to claim virtues which are of Divine nature. Then the door opens to a swing in the other direction, an egoic over-compensation towards materialization and intellectualization of the world and ourselves. Many horrors of recent history have occurred when people least expect them to for this reason. The poles tend to reverse rather abruptly, feeding off of each other's momentum. We mitigate the consequences by anticipating the oscillations within ourselves. That meekness, which treads softly on the 'holy ground' within, born of Self-consciousness, is at the heart of the Christ impulse.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth."

The word translated as "meek" has an interesting meaning:

https://biblehub.com/greek/4239.htm

Cognate: 4239 praýs (also listed as 4239a/praupathia in NAS dictionary) – meek. See 4236 (praótēs).

This difficult-to-translate root (pra-) means more than "meek." Biblical meekness is not weakness but rather refers to exercising God's strength under His control – i.e. demonstrating power without undue harshness.

[The English term "meek" often lacks this blend – i.e. of gentleness (reserve) and strength.

To restate this in my own words, it is something like maintaining an inner strength, even a capacity for violence, which becomes so conscious it is always kept in check on the physical plane and put in service of higher spiritual purposes. Ultimately every dark impulse we have, even those towards violence of every kind, is of Divine nature, so it's not about denying it within us but increasingly spiritualizing its manifestation. That is a constant effort towards the high ideals which can only find its fulfillment by grace of the Gods. We need to keep the personal ego in check at all times, under close scrutiny. When a thought occurs such as, "I am not now and could never be a radical to this degree", we should sense the inner orientation there. It's not about figuring out objectively what statistical chance there is we will end up doing terrible things, but simply the orientation of our spirit. We can try to sense how little we know of ourselves and how much there is yet to be revealed from within during our stay on Earth.

An all-important notion of the Christian outlook is Imitatio Christi, and as we know, Christ accepted responsibility for all sins (Karmic debts) of the world. This can be held very abstractly as in the case of most modern Christians, or more livingly and even scientifically, in the sense that we are all of One Mind with a multiplicity of perspectives evolving along different worldlines but integrating back towards the Center. In that process of integration, we must come to experience the impulses, feelings, and deeds of many other wordlines as our own so that we share in their creative responsibility, even in all that know as darkness and evil. Again, this is something I struggle to understand as well at any deep level, and is mostly just intellectual for me at this stage, but I can sense there is something of immense importance for higher development laying beneath it, something which should be cultivated every chance we get. Steiner offers a very interesting thought-experiment to work with in this connection.

We will proceed in rather a curious way. As an experiment, we will imagine that we ourselves have willed whatever may have happened to us. Suppose a loose tile from the roof of a house happened to crash down on us. We will picture, purely by way of experiment, that this did not happen by chance, and we will deliberately imagine that we ourselves climbed on that roof, loosened the tile and then ran down so quickly that we arrived just in time to be hit by it! Or, let us say, we caught a chill without any apparent cause; how would it be though, if we had given it to ourselves? Like the unfortunate lady who, being discontented with her lot, exposed herself to a chill, and died of it! In this way, therefore, we will imagine that things otherwise attributable to chance have been deliberately and carefully planned by ourselves. And we will also apply the same procedure to matters which are obviously dependent upon the faculties and qualities we happen to possess. Say some arrangement does not work out as planned. If we miss a train, for example, we shall not blame external circumstances but picture to ourselves that it was due to our own slackness. If we think of it in this way, as an experiment, we shall gradually succeed in creating a kind of being in our imagination, a very extraordinary being, who was responsible for all these things — for a stone having crashed upon us, for some illness, and so forth. We shall realise, of course, that this being is not ourselves; we simply picture such a being vividly and distinctly. And then, after a time, we will have a strange experience with regard to this being. We shall realise that though it is a creature we have only conjured up, yet we cannot free ourselves from him nor from the thought of him, and strange to say he does not stay as he is; he becomes alive and transforms himself within us. And then, when he has gone through this transformation, we get the impression that he really is there within us. And then we become more and more certain that we ourselves have had something to do with the things thus built up in imagination. There is no suggestion whatever that we once actually did them; but such thoughts do, nevertheless, correspond in a certain way with something we have done. We shall tell ourselves: ‘I have done this and that, and I am now having to suffer the consequences.’ This is a very good exercise for unfolding in the life of feeling a kind of memory of earlier incarnations. The soul seems to feel: I myself was there and prepared these things myself.

[AshvinP]

This said, it leaves me with a question for Ashvin, you're a lawyer aren't you? How does your spiritual perspective influence your dealing with crime? Are you prosecution or defense most often? (assuming it is that type of law you're in)

I am a bankruptcy attorney, so no criminal work. Mostly I work with consumers or small businesses in too much debt. The crime I come across often is bankruptcy fraud, but never so bad it has been criminally prosecuted.

There are many interesting connections between the modern bankruptcy system and the Judeo-Christian spiritual outlook. The original 'bankruptcy system' goes back to Leviticus, and of course the NT speaks at length about forgiveness of debts in the spiritual sense.

And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. 9Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. 10And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
...
The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me. 24And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land.

25If thy brother be waxen poor, and hath sold away some of his possession, and if any of his kin come to redeem it, then shall he redeem that which his brother sold. 26And if the man have none to redeem it, and himself be able to redeem it; 27Then let him count the years of the sale thereof, and restore the overplus unto the man to whom he sold it; that he may return unto his possession. 28But if he be not able to restore it to him, then that which is sold shall remain in the hand of him that hath bought it until the year of jubile: and in the jubile it shall go out, and he shall return unto his possession.

It's not too difficult to discern the link between modern materialistic consumption via consumer credit and the Karmic debts we incur from that fixation on accumulating physical possessions. The psychic consequences of financial struggle are immense for people. I used to be pretty judgmental of my own clients for how careless and irresponsible they were, and how much honesty and integrity they lack, but now I try to sense the deeper spiritual roots of their situations and dispositions. Although it's still a fine line between understanding that deeper aspect and indulging their vices. I don't do them any favors by pretending their hyper-dependent and entitled attitude towards life is OK.

Generally, as a lawyer, we are trained to not only know the text of the laws, which are very easy to look up online, but sense the spirit of the laws when they were enacted. The various intentions behind them and policy goals they were intended to achieve. That is what allows deeper insights into the legal system, greater flexibility of approach, and ability to reach the shared interests of various parties. So it's not much different than what we should be aiming to do in philosophy, religion, science, aesthetics or our lives within the perceptual world of outer forms in general - to recover the Spirit within. Now I just try to be more self-conscious of what I am doing as a lawyer, in this sense, when I am doing it.

[Federica]

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHoy91Nas/view

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHpPuwixY/view

https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHpBXX_fM/view

Wow, these are fantastic, Federica, thank you!

There is of course a lot to unpack in your response and sketches, and I will get to some response as soon as possible, but I wanted to first really thank you for the imaginative effort here. Perhaps it will even inspire some others to weigh in besides Cleric, yourself, and me!

Ashvin you’re too kind, but I’m glad you liked the attempt, hopefully it will become clearer with some more or a lot more effort, reading and discussing. Thanks for your support!

[Anthony66]

...so that we can truly count ourselves amongst the Gods in Heaven

I've been following all the conversations for the last little while without commenting, but this sub-quote offers me the opportunity to ask a question I've been grappling with in regards to you and Cleric.

If I can be a little provocative, you view the Christian revelation through a very interesting lens and frame the various doctrines/teachings/scripture in a new light which traditional Christianity would count you worthy of the stake. Here you reference "Gods". Christianity/Judaism's gift to the world is a fierce monotheism (even though there are scriptural references which would seem to support many gods). Even if you like me, balk at the exoteric forms of Christianity, does not one have to take some heed of this most central of teachings that there is only one God?

BTW, Cleric gave a great response relating to this matter at viewtopic.php?p=17003#p17003

[Federica]

Hi Cleric, Ashvin,
I am wondering, what would be some criteria that you recommend for choosing a thought-image to concentrate on?

I think this was implicit in Cleric's post, but to make it explicit, the thought-image shouldn't be derived from the sensory world or our accessible memory. If we build up an unfamiliar image with feeling, this makes it less likely we will try to encapsulate the experience with our sensory/intellectual expectations. You perhaps already knew this.

And since I am the 'keeper of quotes' here, I wanted to share something from another 20th century philosopher who intuited these connections and may help orient the feeling.

The word "memory" originally means this incessant concentration on contiguity. In its original telling sense, memory means as much as devotion. This word possesses the special tone of the pious and piety, and designates the devotion of prayer, only because it denotes the all-comprehensive relation of concentration upon the holy and the gracious. The thanc unfolds in memory, which persists as devotion. Memory in this originary sense later loses its name to a restricted denomination, which now signifies no more than the capacity to retain things that are in the past.

But if we understand memory in the light of the old word thanc, the connection between memory and thanks will dawn on us at once. For in giving thanks, the heart in thought recalls where it remains gathered and concentrated, because that is where it belongs. This thinking that recalls in memory is the original thanks.

Where can a thought-image come from, if not from sensory world and not from accessible memory? The clip taken from the Electric Ship screensaver has been captured in both. I am familiar with it now, just from reading the post. Do you mean that it should be an original thought creation that is ideated entirely from within and maintained throughout the meditation?

The quote from Heidegger is also enigmatic. Contiguity and the accruing nature of the memory-thought I do remember, from an older conversation with Cleric, but I miss the link from there to devotion. I wonder if repetition could be a linking word... or maybe better: concentration? Am I onto something? I will read more about this old word thanc to get a better sense. Thank you!

[AshvinP]

...so that we can truly count ourselves amongst the Gods in Heaven

I've been following all the conversations for the last little while without commenting, but this sub-quote offers me the opportunity to ask a question I've been grappling with in regards to you and Cleric.

If I can be a little provocative, you view the Christian revelation through a very interesting lens and frame the various doctrines/teachings/scripture in a new light which traditional Christianity would count you worthy of the stake. Here you reference "Gods". Christianity/Judaism's gift to the world is a fierce monotheism (even though there are scriptural references which would seem to support many gods). Even if you like me, balk at the exoteric forms of Christianity, does not one have to take some heed of this most central of teachings that there is only one God?

BTW, Cleric gave a great response relating to this matter at viewtopic.php?p=17003#p17003

Anthony,

Good to hear from you!

Yes, Cleric's illustration there was very helpful for me also.

Regarding exoteric Christianity, it becomes pretty simple when we understand how exoteric history/culture has proceeded. It doesn't matter whether we are talking about philosophy, religion, science, etc., as they all share the same common attributes of intellectual consciousness which has flattened out the depth structure of the Cosmos and stripped it of most living significance. Just take the multiplicity of Christian denominations and their various scriptural doctrines about baptism, church history, faith and works, the canon of scripture, the apocalypse, rapture, etc. What practical difference does it make if one holds to one view vs. another? Very little. These things used to carry much more living significance in the early Church and Middle Ages, but now they are like switches of dogma that one can turn 'on' or 'off' with little influence on how one relates to the living God, goes about life on Earth, or orients towards the threshold of death and beyond. That is not to say there is no importance of these streams developing in human religious history, but we gain much more insight into them by focusing on that evolutionary development rather than their specific dogmatic content.

It's interesting because Steiner actually remarks on how most Christians at his time were already relating to and worshipping their own personal angel as "God", rather than the supreme Godhead. That makes sense if the depth structure has been flattened out by the intellect. Everything revealed in scripture is conceived in terms of what is material/perceptual (past) and encompassed by the mind-container with its intellectual concepts, while what is invisible, ideational, future, i.e. the spiritual pole, is blotted out. There is no understanding of the kenosis of the Spirit, i.e. the involution-differentiation, which occurred over many aeons, ages, and epochs (and is recounted in Genesis). Likewise, the unknown periods between death and rebirth have been flattened out into non-existence. Again, there was a purpose behind these developments - early dogma was in some ways intended to blot out consciousness of reincarnation in the early Church, so people would place emphasis on cultivating necessary virtues within a single lifetime. As you know, such cultivation is necessary for the pursuit of higher cognition in our own time, which then brings us back to living knowledge of the spiritual pole.

But if we stop with the 'infant's milk', the mere preparatory stages, then it's all for naught. That's at the heart of all flawed modern worldviews, secular or religious - they confuse incomplete conceptual understanding for complete truth, partial spatiotemporal angles on phenomena for the most comprehensive image one can attain. In other words, idolatry. What makes this happen so often? It's the 3rd-person 'omniscient' perspective. The modern Christian fundamentalist, like the materialist, analytic idealism, mysticist, etc., must actually imagine he has a Godlike perspective on the entire Cosmos to then conceive a religious ontology with dogma which claims to be absolutely "true" for all places and times. Isn't such a move really the most 'heretical' of all? So we don't need to dismiss any 'central teachings' of Christianity or of any other modern worldview, only put them in their proper evolutionary context, which necessarily involves understanding them as the revelations of living ideational beings - the Gods - in whose consciousness we are nested, from whom we have descended and to whom we are reascending in humility, devotion, and living knowledge.

[AshvinP]

Hi Cleric, Ashvin,
I am wondering, what would be some criteria that you recommend for choosing a thought-image to concentrate on?

I think this was implicit in Cleric's post, but to make it explicit, the thought-image shouldn't be derived from the sensory world or our accessible memory. If we build up an unfamiliar image with feeling, this makes it less likely we will try to encapsulate the experience with our sensory/intellectual expectations. You perhaps already knew this.

And since I am the 'keeper of quotes' here, I wanted to share something from another 20th century philosopher who intuited these connections and may help orient the feeling.

The word "memory" originally means this incessant concentration on contiguity. In its original telling sense, memory means as much as devotion. This word possesses the special tone of the pious and piety, and designates the devotion of prayer, only because it denotes the all-comprehensive relation of concentration upon the holy and the gracious. The thanc unfolds in memory, which persists as devotion. Memory in this originary sense later loses its name to a restricted denomination, which now signifies no more than the capacity to retain things that are in the past.

But if we understand memory in the light of the old word thanc, the connection between memory and thanks will dawn on us at once. For in giving thanks, the heart in thought recalls where it remains gathered and concentrated, because that is where it belongs. This thinking that recalls in memory is the original thanks.

Where can a thought-image come from, if not from sensory world and not from accessible memory? The clip taken from the Electric Ship screensaver has been captured in both. I am familiar with it now, just from reading the post. Do you mean that it should be an original thought creation that is ideated entirely from within and maintained throughout the meditation?

The quote from Heidegger is also enigmatic. Contiguity and the accruing nature of the memory-thought I do remember, from an older conversation with Cleric, but I miss the link from there to devotion. I wonder if repetition could be a linking word... or maybe better: concentration? Am I onto something? I will read more about this old word thanc to get a better sense. Thank you!

The thought-image will be of a sensory nature, visual or auditory, but it shouldn't copy a natural appearance in the world, like a tree or a flower. It could be a combination of images which are not usually combined in the natural world. Yet it should also remain as simple as possible.

Steiner gives the example of turning to a random page in a book and taking the first line one comes across. So really any such unfamiliar thought-content which we make our own, i.e. build and imbue with feeling, can become the object of meditation and weave our thinking into the higher worlds. I suppose even a familiar sensory image could work, but this is an unnecessary obstacle to begin with, since we have our conditioned concepts/expectations associated with such images.

re: Memory - we can ask, what exactly are we re-membering? It's nothing other than the higher, more integrated, worlds of soul and spirit processes from which we descended, which were much more intertwined with the physical plane than today. Ancient consciousness really had a living memory of those higher worlds from previous incarnations. Here is an interesting passage to consider which ties into the Biblical narrative.

In the distant past a name had a quite other significance than what it has to-day. Names in ancient times require a special study — what philologists say of them is incorrect. In former days names were not associated with things and people externally as they are now. A name at that time was something vital, something connected in a living way with the nature of the being or thing named; it was an expression in sound of the inner character of the being. It had to echo in sound the nature of that being. Modern learning is ignorant of this wisdom. The Kritic der Sprache, by Fritz Mauthner, reviews at great length all the modern learning in regard to speech, but omits what throughout the ages has been the essence of speech. Such a book could not have been written in olden times. A name did not then merely signify an individual with his personal life, but it included all that memory could link together, so that a name was used as long as memory endured. ‘Noah,’ for instance, was not a name for one man, it signified what one man remembered of his own life — then of his pre-earthly life, then of the life of his father, grandfather, etc. So long as the threads of memory endured one name was used for a succession of persons. ‘Adam,’ ‘Seth,’ or ‘Enoch’ are names which comprise as many persons as were united through the retention of retrospective recollection. When we are told in ancient times that a certain person was called ‘Enoch,’ it means that in a person, who was the son of someone otherwise designate, a new thread of memory had arisen, which does not go back to previous personalities. This new thread of memory then is not cut off at death, but is carried on, after the death of the first Enoch, from father to son down through the generations until a new memory arises and with it another name. As long as the thread of memory endured, the same name was used. In a family line several persons had but one name; as for example with the name ‘Adam.’