AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jul 30, 2022 12:05 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Sat Jul 30, 2022 8:56 am
our 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.
I think first we should be clear on what it means to really know ourselves from within. At first or second glance, it will indeed seem like most of us don't "feel ourselves as only belonging to a certain group". We will surely say, "we are living organisms and human beings first and foremost, and that's how I identify myself and everyone else". But, as we know, these superficial glances by the rational intellect cannot be mistaken for deep knowledge of what we do or don't actually identify with. Instead of going into PoF-style theory of knowledge or something similar, though, let's try a different approach.
Imagine a situation in which a parent or close relative is in imminent peril and the only way to stop their death is to sacrifice the life of another person you don't know. We should really try to inhabit the situation as if it is occurring. If the chances are good that we might make this sacrifice to save our loved one, can we say that we are identifying with our family or blood relatives? It is only in extreme situations such as these where we can get a glimpse of such identifications, and even those thought-experiments aren't really enough. We are talking about layers of our Being which were laid down over many thousands of years. Our species, our gender, our close blood relations, our race, our temperaments, etc.
The overall point is that we shouldn't be so quick to assume our current feeling of what we identify with is actually known. In fact there are great reasons to conclude they are hardly known at all. In the midst of an actual bloody war, will we consider a person of different nationality as equal value to our brother or sister-in-arms? We can't be so sure of these things. Modern civilized society gives us the luxury to rarely if ever be put in a situation where we would have our spirit tested to this extent, and therefore have the opportunity for these deeper layers to be revealed to us. That is why we must be endure the inner tests of the spiritual path - initiation - for them to gradually emerge into consciousness. Unlike a bloody war, on this path we can confront these layers dispassionately, with sober judgment, and therefore integrate them into our consciousness.
At a more theoretical level, whenever we are willing, feeling, thinking based on sensory perceptions, including inner concepts, we are living in the past and therefore 'going down the Karma way'. There isn't anything necessarily wrong with this - Karma is not some external punishment by higher beings for our wrongdoing, but the natural result of our evolutionary progression and the means through which the possibility of
spiritual freedom also emerges. There can only be freedom if there are ingrained channels of Being which resist our spiritual activity, thereby giving us the opportunity to modify those channels through increasing self-consciousness. If no such resistance was offered, we would simply live as spiritual infants flowing along with the undifferentiated meaning of spiritual impulses.
We can also think about it this way - if we already knew from within what we identify with, we could choose
not to identify with it, and then we would be spiritually free. Then further evolution towards our higher Self wouldn't be necessary. This higher Self is the Karma of humanity as a whole. To identify with the higher Self is to accept creative responsibility for all human perspectives, including the radical ones which we currently distance ourselves from. Of course, merely saying or feeling or conceiving we have "accepted creative responsibility" is not to be confused with actually doing so. The latter means we have encompassed all such perspectives inwardly with our expanding Ego-consciousness.
The only time we are really living in the future, and therefore acting free of Karma, is when we are doing thinking meditations which engage the higher faculties such as the Imagination.
Witzenmann, 'What is Meditation?' wrote:It [i.e. this reality meditation] grants the certainty that there is an absolute meaning, for it progressively realizes this meaning. This signifies that the nature of meditation is not something to attain but to achieve – an achievement by which man accomplishes himself. Modern meditation does not desire an entrance into a spiritual world antecedent to it, but rather freely gives itself the responsibility for the origin of a spiritual world, which can only arise out of man accomplishing himself in meditation as a world first. Modern meditation does not object to a desire for self-perfection for reasons that renunciation might expect an all the more richer welcome – but from the insight that neither desire nor renunciation can attain a real meditative content, since only the meditation itself can give this to the latter. This is not the loan that awaits it, but the gift that it offers to the world. Modern meditation is not the path into a pre-meditative world, but the formation of a new metamorphosis of the world. The nature of modern meditative experience is neither one of creaturely emerging from the creative powers of the world nor the dissolution therein, but the transformed emergence of creative spirituality from human self-formation. Meditation is the moral intuition of the human being, the moral imagination of the transmutation of the world process in man and the moral technique of freedom. Herein lies the difference to all previous forms of meditative life.
So we can really sense how humanity is at the very daybreak of engaging in free spiritual activity, that inner activity which identifies more and more with the core individuality which is common to humanity as such. Now one can ask, "ok but why does this matter... isn't it still worthwhile for me to differentiate degrees of identification between myself and others?" Yes, perhaps, but again the inner orientation is what is most important. Again, it's not about what we can objectively prove about ourselves or others. The inversion horizon rests on this orientation that we are not yet knowledgeable, moral, free beings. It rests on us always first locating the beam within our own eyes before criticizing the speck in our brother's eye. This comes back to the question of Christian theological doctrines and how to understand them.
Federica wrote:I await to get a sense of how this is exactly expressed in Steiner. The voice emerging from his pages - for the little I have read until now - has always sounded to me exactly right and I never felt the sense of slight constriction that I am finding now, reading about total depravity, learned helplessness, and imitatio Christi. Doctrine is another word that excites some degrees of rebellion I should say. Doctrine sounds to me like the fine print of dogma.
Now I realize that this whole uncomfortable impression and feeling could come entirely from my side, without being implied in and conveyed by your words. I am simply saying, my conclusion is, that I am trying to suspend judgment, and putting this thing on a shelf in plain view, so I can better examine it further.
This being said, I understand and agree that from a spiritual perspective we are not advanced at all, and that egoism can always creep in, and that we should pay attention to these oscillations within ourselves. And you are right here, I take your point:
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.
Again, I only doubt that theological doctrine is the way to reach there. I definitely don’t sense that there is ‘anything of immense importance for higher development lying beneath it’. I should also say, reading the exercise that Steiner suggests in this connection, and although I think the exercise should not be put in everyone's hands and could stir up underlying mental health weaknesses, I am fine with it. Again, here I find a different language, a different spirit. Not similar to the one I gather from theological doctrine, total depravity and the like.
.
Indeed, Steiner has a much more living way of conveying these things. I would always encourage you to seek out his commentaries on Christian scripture and theology. But we should be clear he isn't rejecting the
essence of any such doctrines, only helping us put them back into their living evolutionary context, which then gives them much deeper and more immanent significance for our lives and journeys.
So we should treat these doctrines as we do any outer perception - they are forms which don't immediately disclose their full depth of meaning. It is precisely the task of humanity in this age to begin imparting that depth of meaning back to the outer appearances, via spiritual science, and most of all to such doctrines as
Imitatio Christi or 'original sin'. We can understand the latter as a polarity - this inheritance of Karma entered human evolution quite apart from our free inner activity, before there was even any Ego-consciousness which allowed for identification as an individuality. As we know, all poles only appear in the context of an opposite pole, a counter-force. The latter is free Grace. We didn't freely enter into the world of sin and Karma, but we are freely shown a path out of it and freely given the inner tools to follow that path. We don't need to earn that Grace - it is naturally given to us as the counter-pole to original sin. Christ incarnate is the archetype here - he was most innocent of sin amongst all humans, yet suffered our same fate on the Cross and was resurrected to a new life within the higher worlds. He is both the example to follow and the means by which to follow it.
"Wherefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings, As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious."
It is natural to struggle with these doctrines, and as mentioned I do as well, but we should realize that is precisely because we have not yet cultivated the free inner activity to restore their higher meaning. Like all outer forms and teachings, they are oppressed under the weight of dry intellectualism. It is no different than the teachings of modern philosophy, like "MAL" or "dissociative boundaries" etc. These are simply outer husks of meaning, but all such concepts point to something of real meaningful significance. Ironically, when we really reject intellectual reductionism with our inner activity, we eventually come back to such things as original sin, total depravity, faith, grace, etc. on a higher plane. Then they carry very much the opposite significance of what they do in modern theology - they don't point to our helplessness, worthlessness, total enslavement to guilty conscience, etc., but to the evolutionary progression which results in moral imagination, inspiration, intuition and spiritual freedom - Ideas which cannot be grasped by the intellect alone - but only IF we resist the temptation to identify our current state of being as one that is already free.
...
What's most remarkable to me is how used to these things that I have become, like "yeah, of course 'space travel' is what we are actually doing".