Whirlpool's core/first motion

[Federica]

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.

Ashvin, you start off by saying that we are for the most part on the same page on these ‘nuanced discussions’, but I must admit I’m having a hard time finding good alignment with some of the further thoughts you express here. Well, the first one, I agree with:

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!"

I agree, there is such a recognizable generalized tendency. As a side note, it can be noticed that, for complex reasons, this particular tendency happens to be more pronounced in some cultures, like for example, but not only, the North American one. By contrast, the culture I live in, Scandinavia, is shaped in such a way that guards more against falling prey to the ‘we did it / they blew it’ mind habit. There is even a word to designate the person who is mindful of not falling prey to that trap. Unsurprisingly, putting it to English is not self-evident and the most disparate translations can be found. I should immediately add that in no way I am suggesting that this is a 'better culture' - I repeat: please believe me even if I'm not going to develop here, that I am in no way suggesting that this is a 'better culture' - I am only further nuancing the perception of how this general tendency is nowadays expressed.
When it comes to me personally, the only thing I can say is that I am aware of the pressure exercised by the tendency on me, and I am under the impression that I am vigilant in this respect. With which results, I cannot judge. I have to notice though, that this way of 'understanding ourselves better and remaining critical' seems to have a pernicious, inbuild fallacy, where I could go on and say: 'the fact that you are guarding against this, shows that you are somehow putting yourself above this, so you should guard yourself against guarding others against it' and you could reply: 'now your warning me in this way, implies that you put yourself above that all, so please realize this is also a rising above which should be guarded against..' and so on ad infinitum, in a loop that can be run entirely with oneself as well, of course.
So I can imagine that the real way out here is by sensing the spiritual landscape, for those who can, and for those who can’t, it’s better to relax the ‘fractal’ attempt to include unconscious matter in this way, and rely on no-nonsense, self-honest, simple, loving good sense.

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.

I have related this to Karma to follow the fact that you did, in this cross-thread discussion started from BK’s last AMA and that, as you put it, ‘we can't judge any particular individual thinker too negatively’ as karma plays out. Here I have to admit, I feel slightly disturbed by this idea of the balance sheet of karma, and that we can’t move a finger on this Earth without generating debt, sin, that needs to be balanced, and that only the clemence of the Gods could offset (why elswhere restrict the spiritual beings or Gods and their loving grace to Christian faith/grace…?). It's as if I could almost hear the covertly threatening, thin halo of guilt hovering here, murmuring in our ear that by simply existing we are depraved sinners, and even if we spent our whole life, or lives, expiating, even that wouldn’t be enough… And I am almost reassured that you struggle with the doctrine of total depravity, as I summarily understand it in its theological meaning from wikipedia. I mean… who should abide by such an abstract, humiliating view of human nature? Is this really a requirement of spiritual science? I see neither spiritual freedom here, nor can I see aspiration to oneness. I see constriction, and the effusion of unnecessary guilt and threat.


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.

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[AshvinP]

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. 

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.

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. 

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

I can't discern any issues with this diagram and your description. We should just remember that ordinary thinking only goes so far in the balancing, not very far at all. In this sense, it is not fully conscious. Our ordinary thoughts and ideas are highly conditioned by our Karma, by the ideational currents of higher beings.

[AshvinP]

...

Here is one more angle - without these radical views, where would we, as 'non-radicals', be? This wide differentiation in perspectives is necessary for our evolution. The radical and regressive views offer up the resistance to our evolution which allows the possibility of cultivating virtues and freedom through self-consciousness. We need to take the long, broad, deep evolutionary view here. Just as little as the person with radical views freely chose their Karma, so little did we freely earn the right not to be in those evolutionary streams of resistance. This has certainly changing as the capacity for free spiritual activity emerges, but the precondition to that activity is a remembrance and recognition of our unfree incarnations through the progression of Karma.

It's interesting how these polar relations work. You may be concentrating in meditation for ex. and so distracted that you finally have enough and call it quits, but as you are getting ready to open your eyes and get up, suddenly your concentration spirals back together. Or maybe you wake up in the middle of night and can't get back to sleep, so you decide "OK, I'm just going to stay awake", and then suddenly you doze off to sleep. When we surrender to our 'learned helplessness' or the reality of our 'total depravity', to the necessity of Grace in reasoned humility and faith, the pathways to actually change our lot and become creative, virtuous beings open up. We can then grow into the ideational Consciousness from which the collective identifications are born.

And at a much later evolutionary stage, you will be a Being who ideates the channels of those identifications for lower beings. It won't happen exactly the same way, but the archetypal activity persists. You will be at the vantage point from which the multiplicity of identifications and perspectives, painful and 'cruel' as they may seem from the lower perspective who is still evolving through them, work together for a higher Good which you are responsible for bringing about. And it may seem rather silly to you that one perspective nested within your Idea calls themselves "non-radical" in contrast to the "radicals" and feels proud of it.

[Federica]

...

Here is one more angle - without these radical views, where would we, as 'non-radicals', be? This wide differentiation in perspectives is necessary for our evolution. The radical and regressive views offer up the resistance to our evolution which allows the possibility of cultivating virtues and freedom through self-consciousness. We need to take the long, broad, deep evolutionary view here. Just as little as the person with radical views freely chose their Karma, so little did we freely earn the right not to be in those evolutionary streams of resistance. This has certainly changing as the capacity for free spiritual activity emerges, but the precondition to that activity is a remembrance and recognition of our unfree incarnations through the progression of Karma.

It's interesting how these polar relations work. You may be concentrating in meditation for ex. and so distracted that you finally have enough and call it quits, but as you are getting ready to open your eyes and get up, suddenly your concentration spirals back together. Or maybe you wake up in the middle of night and can't get back to sleep, so you decide "OK, I'm just going to stay awake", and then suddenly you doze off to sleep. When we surrender to our 'learned helplessness' or the reality of our 'total depravity', to the necessity of Grace in reasoned humility and faith, the pathways to actually change our lot and become creative, virtuous beings open up. We can then grow into the ideational Consciousness from which the collective identifications are born.

And at a much later evolutionary stage, you will be a Being who ideates the channels of those identifications for lower beings. It won't happen exactly the same way, but the archetypal activity persists. You will be at the vantage point from which the multiplicity of identifications and perspectives, painful and 'cruel' as they may seem from the lower perspective who is still evolving through them, work together for a higher Good which you are responsible for bringing about. And it may seem rather silly to you that one perspective nested within your Idea calls themselves "non-radical" in contrast to the "radicals" and feels proud of it.

Ashvin,

I appreciate the multiple perspectives you are offering, I mean, the lengths you are going, but…
I will take a little longer to un-freely reflect on part one, but in this part two... you really are pushing… I don’t know if it's not at the border of being a little too much, both for me to stay tuned and for you to not half-regret what you are writing? And please forgive me if this is only the incorrect limited perspective or feeling of an ordinarily thinking soul.
Can really one angle be to put me in the future perspective of having become a higher being, which then forces you to make that being look at things from above and find them ‘rather silly’? Am I really supposed to overcome my current struggles through imagining myself as a much later stage such being? These methods… It does sound borderline. I am keeping an open mind here, and I am also not losing sight of both your intention with this message and your 'self-determined perspective' - since you don't want me to call it advanced. But I have to tell you this.
Moreover, and agreed that I am currently unconscious of most of my feelings of belonging, and of my identifications altogether - please consider nonetheless that one cannot be proud of an absence. By the way, every time I think of the feeling of pride, it comes as being proud on something, not of something. That’s also how it is expressed in other languages, although wrong in English. One has to have won or snatched something, then stepped on it, a pedestal, a prize, a corpse, a placeholder of one’s vanity. Only then can one, from that height, stand out, and so be proud on it.

[AshvinP]

...

Here is one more angle - without these radical views, where would we, as 'non-radicals', be? This wide differentiation in perspectives is necessary for our evolution. The radical and regressive views offer up the resistance to our evolution which allows the possibility of cultivating virtues and freedom through self-consciousness. We need to take the long, broad, deep evolutionary view here. Just as little as the person with radical views freely chose their Karma, so little did we freely earn the right not to be in those evolutionary streams of resistance. This has certainly changing as the capacity for free spiritual activity emerges, but the precondition to that activity is a remembrance and recognition of our unfree incarnations through the progression of Karma.

It's interesting how these polar relations work. You may be concentrating in meditation for ex. and so distracted that you finally have enough and call it quits, but as you are getting ready to open your eyes and get up, suddenly your concentration spirals back together. Or maybe you wake up in the middle of night and can't get back to sleep, so you decide "OK, I'm just going to stay awake", and then suddenly you doze off to sleep. When we surrender to our 'learned helplessness' or the reality of our 'total depravity', to the necessity of Grace in reasoned humility and faith, the pathways to actually change our lot and become creative, virtuous beings open up. We can then grow into the ideational Consciousness from which the collective identifications are born.

And at a much later evolutionary stage, you will be a Being who ideates the channels of those identifications for lower beings. It won't happen exactly the same way, but the archetypal activity persists. You will be at the vantage point from which the multiplicity of identifications and perspectives, painful and 'cruel' as they may seem from the lower perspective who is still evolving through them, work together for a higher Good which you are responsible for bringing about. And it may seem rather silly to you that one perspective nested within your Idea calls themselves "non-radical" in contrast to the "radicals" and feels proud of it.

Ashvin,

I appreciate the multiple perspectives you are offering, I mean, the lengths you are going, but…
I will take a little longer to un-freely reflect on part one, but in this part two... you really are pushing… I don’t know if it's not at the border of being a little too much, both for me to stay tuned and for you to not half-regret what you are writing? And please forgive me if this is only the incorrect limited perspective or feeling of an ordinarily thinking soul.
Can really one angle be to put me in the future perspective of having become a higher being, which then forces you to make that being look at things from above and find them ‘rather silly’? Am I really supposed to overcome my current struggles through imagining myself as a much later stage such being? These methods… It does sound borderline. I am keeping an open mind here, and I am also not losing sight of both your intention with this message and your 'self-determined perspective' - since you don't want me to call it advanced. But I have to tell you this.
Moreover, and agreed that I am currently unconscious of most of my feelings of belonging, and of my identifications altogether - please consider nonetheless that one cannot be proud of an absence. By the way, every time I think of the feeling of pride, it comes as being proud on something, not of something. That’s also how it is expressed in other languages, although wrong in English. One has to have won or snatched something, then stepped on it, a pedestal, a prize, a corpse, a placeholder of one’s vanity. Only then can one, from that height, stand out, and so be proud on it.

I guess it may be helpful for me to step back and ask, what is at the core of this current discussion? What practical obstacle to your spiritual growth do you feel needs to be navigated here? It's not my intention to debate these deep matters of spiritual evolution, necessarily tied into Christian doctrine (and all other relgious teachings), if it's only a matter of intellectual curiosity or reluctant feelings. On the other hand, if the idea of wise spiritual powers guiding our evolution and using all 'evil' activities towards the fulfillment of Good, all unfree and tribal thoughts, feelings, actions, etc. in the evolution of individual freedom, is something you struggle to understand or find the proper context for in your current spiritual path, then I think it's worth discussing more. So what is the "current struggle" exactly?

[Federica]

Here is one more angle - without these radical views, where would we, as 'non-radicals', be? This wide differentiation in perspectives is necessary for our evolution. The radical and regressive views offer up the resistance to our evolution which allows the possibility of cultivating virtues and freedom through self-consciousness. We need to take the long, broad, deep evolutionary view here. Just as little as the person with radical views freely chose their Karma, so little did we freely earn the right not to be in those evolutionary streams of resistance. This has certainly changing as the capacity for free spiritual activity emerges, but the precondition to that activity is a remembrance and recognition of our unfree incarnations through the progression of Karma.

It's interesting how these polar relations work. You may be concentrating in meditation for ex. and so distracted that you finally have enough and call it quits, but as you are getting ready to open your eyes and get up, suddenly your concentration spirals back together. Or maybe you wake up in the middle of night and can't get back to sleep, so you decide "OK, I'm just going to stay awake", and then suddenly you doze off to sleep. When we surrender to our 'learned helplessness' or the reality of our 'total depravity', to the necessity of Grace in reasoned humility and faith, the pathways to actually change our lot and become creative, virtuous beings open up. We can then grow into the ideational Consciousness from which the collective identifications are born.

And at a much later evolutionary stage, you will be a Being who ideates the channels of those identifications for lower beings. It won't happen exactly the same way, but the archetypal activity persists. You will be at the vantage point from which the multiplicity of identifications and perspectives, painful and 'cruel' as they may seem from the lower perspective who is still evolving through them, work together for a higher Good which you are responsible for bringing about. And it may seem rather silly to you that one perspective nested within your Idea calls themselves "non-radical" in contrast to the "radicals" and feels proud of it.

Ashvin,

I appreciate the multiple perspectives you are offering, I mean, the lengths you are going, but…
I will take a little longer to un-freely reflect on part one, but in this part two... you really are pushing… I don’t know if it's not at the border of being a little too much, both for me to stay tuned and for you to not half-regret what you are writing? And please forgive me if this is only the incorrect limited perspective or feeling of an ordinarily thinking soul.
Can really one angle be to put me in the future perspective of having become a higher being, which then forces you to make that being look at things from above and find them ‘rather silly’? Am I really supposed to overcome my current struggles through imagining myself as a much later stage such being? These methods… It does sound borderline. I am keeping an open mind here, and I am also not losing sight of both your intention with this message and your 'self-determined perspective' - since you don't want me to call it advanced. But I have to tell you this.
Moreover, and agreed that I am currently unconscious of most of my feelings of belonging, and of my identifications altogether - please consider nonetheless that one cannot be proud of an absence. By the way, every time I think of the feeling of pride, it comes as being proud on something, not of something. That’s also how it is expressed in other languages, although wrong in English. One has to have won or snatched something, then stepped on it, a pedestal, a prize, a corpse, a placeholder of one’s vanity. Only then can one, from that height, stand out, and so be proud on it.

I guess it may be helpful for me to step back and ask, what is at the core of this current discussion? What practical obstacle to your spiritual growth do you feel needs to be navigated here? It's not my intention to debate these deep matters of spiritual evolution, necessarily tied into Christian doctrine (and all other relgious teachings), if it's only a matter of intellectual curiosity or reluctant feelings. On the other hand, if the idea of wise spiritual powers guiding our evolution and using all 'evil' activities towards the fulfillment of Good, all unfree and tribal thoughts, feelings, actions, etc. in the evolution of individual freedom, is something you struggle to understand or find the proper context for in your current spiritual path, then I think it's worth discussing more. So what is the "current struggle" exactly?

At the core of the current discussion is the understanding of Feeling. This was the starting point. Understanding Feeling requires to discuss this:

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.

This intersection is the core of the current discussion. Why do you call it a debate now?
What makes you now think that it could be a matter of intellectual curiosity or reluctant feelings on my part?

What practical obstacles do I encounter: I haven’t encountered any real obstacles yet. I encounter tasks for now. The main task is to approach the views I am exposed to, here and with the things I am reading, and connect them in a wholeness that I can somehow keep contact with and track of. On second thought, I do struggle with this task. It is a difficult task for me, it goes slowly. It’s an objective struggle but I don’t feel the struggle. I am eager and happy to do that. I spend more time than my calendar would allow me to spend on that.

But are you basically saying that you only want to discuss more if there are things about the path I don’t get, so you can deliver the answer, but if I go into replying and discussing, this is proof of intellectual curiosity and reluctant feelings, and then you are not interested?

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

I appreciate the multiple perspectives you are offering, I mean, the lengths you are going, but…
I will take a little longer to un-freely reflect on part one, but in this part two... you really are pushing… I don’t know if it's not at the border of being a little too much, both for me to stay tuned and for you to not half-regret what you are writing? And please forgive me if this is only the incorrect limited perspective or feeling of an ordinarily thinking soul.
Can really one angle be to put me in the future perspective of having become a higher being, which then forces you to make that being look at things from above and find them ‘rather silly’? Am I really supposed to overcome my current struggles through imagining myself as a much later stage such being? These methods… It does sound borderline. I am keeping an open mind here, and I am also not losing sight of both your intention with this message and your 'self-determined perspective' - since you don't want me to call it advanced. But I have to tell you this.
Moreover, and agreed that I am currently unconscious of most of my feelings of belonging, and of my identifications altogether - please consider nonetheless that one cannot be proud of an absence. By the way, every time I think of the feeling of pride, it comes as being proud on something, not of something. That’s also how it is expressed in other languages, although wrong in English. One has to have won or snatched something, then stepped on it, a pedestal, a prize, a corpse, a placeholder of one’s vanity. Only then can one, from that height, stand out, and so be proud on it.

I guess it may be helpful for me to step back and ask, what is at the core of this current discussion? What practical obstacle to your spiritual growth do you feel needs to be navigated here? It's not my intention to debate these deep matters of spiritual evolution, necessarily tied into Christian doctrine (and all other relgious teachings), if it's only a matter of intellectual curiosity or reluctant feelings. On the other hand, if the idea of wise spiritual powers guiding our evolution and using all 'evil' activities towards the fulfillment of Good, all unfree and tribal thoughts, feelings, actions, etc. in the evolution of individual freedom, is something you struggle to understand or find the proper context for in your current spiritual path, then I think it's worth discussing more. So what is the "current struggle" exactly?

At the core of the current discussion is the understanding of Feeling. This was the starting point. Understanding Feeling requires to discuss this:

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.

This intersection is the core of the current discussion. Why do you call it a debate now?
What makes you now think that it could be a matter of intellectual curiosity or reluctant feelings on my part?

What practical obstacles do I encounter: I haven’t encountered any real obstacles yet. I encounter tasks for now. The main task is to approach the views I am exposed to, here and with the things I am reading, and connect them in a wholeness that I can somehow keep contact with and track of. On second thought, I do struggle with this task. It is a difficult task for me, it goes slowly. It’s an objective struggle but I don’t feel the struggle. I am eager and happy to do that. I spend more time than my calendar would allow me to spend on that.

But are you basically saying that you only want to discuss more if there are things about the path I don’t get, so you can deliver the answer, but if I go into replying and discussing, this is proof of intellectual curiosity and reluctant feelings, and then you are not interested?

Federica,

For purposes of this discussion, I'm mostly interested with the inner obstacles you are facing on the intuitive thinking path, which will surely arise. When it seems like I am forcing you to overextend to the point where I am creating premature inner obstacles for you, then that's when I am reluctant to go further. This whole area of Christian doctrine is the hottest button topic for our time, even if it's not really evident at first. It really underlies all the obstacles we will face on the path. We are dealing with the deepest moral fabric of reality which is responsible for our existence and evolution, our outer and inner worlds.

Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word 'doctrine' and referenced specific ones like 'total depravity'. I use the word "doctrine" like I would use the word "philosophy", such as materialism or idealism - it's simply a perception-conception which is a symbol for an overarching Idea which is temporally extended, born of the eternal Spirit. The specific cultural manifestations over the last 2,000 years can be instructive, but are not really at issue here. If we can't inhabit the inner perspective of these Ideas, which most of us can't, then the best we can do is try to shift our thinking to orient from that eternal, spiritual pole of existence (where we live between death and rebirth). Understanding Feeling was the issue, but it was further narrowed to the following sentiment, which I have been responding to over the last few comments.

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.

Since I take the opposite position - we are those people - it could be called a debate. You further stated,

I don’t know if it's not at the border of being a little too much, both for me to stay tuned and for you to not half-regret what you are writing?

Perhaps I do half-regret writing it, for the reasons stated above, but not because I think the substance or spirit of what was written was incorrect. Most of all, none of this should be taken as moralism or dogma which is independent of rigorous logical thinking. It is all rooted in the deepest spiritual science. I am sure now that I did not make that clear enough before, if at all. It has been the most profound realization for me to discern the ways in which unprejudiced and independent spiritual scientific research leads one right back to the Wisdom of ancient mythology and spirituality, especially the Christian teachings (in their deep esoteric dimension). Dogma implies something which is substituted in once scientific reasoning cannot go further, and that's the opposite of what we are speaking of here. In fact, we cannot really understand the Christian teachings without the spiritual scientific foundation, just as we cannot understand the principles of 20th century theoretical physics without some background in its research.

I took a drive today and just 'happened' to open up an audio lecture with the following passage from Steiner, so I feel it should be shared and hopefully it will clarify what I have written before re: Karma and Christian teaching. As we have already established, Steiner has a much more living and insightful way of conveying these things, and these are live lectures he is giving to people without notes. It is beyond remarkable.

I will confess that I would never have understood the part about the Elohim breathing the living being of man into his mouth and nose [from Genesis], if I had not known beforehand that the breath of earthly human beings also contains the first germinal beginnings of the beings who will become human on Jupiter. But Jupiter human beings can only arise from the kind of breath that owes its existence to deeds that obey the ‘you shall’, and which are therefore moral actions.

Thus we see that through our earthly morality we take a creative part in the whole cosmic order. It is indeed a creative power, and we can see that spiritual science gives us a strong impulse for moral action by telling us that we are working against the creation of Jupiter human beings, if we do not act in a moral way on earth. This gives morality a very real value and makes its existence worthwhile. Our human conduct is very strongly formed by what we acquire through spiritual science, especially as we become acquainted with real secrets regarding the cosmos.
...
Everyone makes a certain discovery in the course of concentrating. If we place a thought in the centre of our consciousness and focus all our soul activity on it, we shall notice the thought growing stronger and stronger. Certainly it does. But then there comes a point where it does not get stronger any more but gets weaker and fades away. This is an experience lots of you will have had. The thought has to fade away, it has, as it were, to die away inside. For the kind of thoughts we have to begin with and the way we think, are through the instrument of the physical body, and we concentrate the kind of thinking we do by means of the instrument of the physical body until the moment the thought dies, then we slip out of the physical body.

We would go into the unconscious altogether if, parallel with this concentration exercise, we did not attempt to do something else to maintain our consciousness when we have slipped out of our physical body. What we have to do to maintain our consciousness when we are outside, is what we call leading a calm and composed life and accepting the things of the world calmly. We can do even more than accept things calmly. We can take seriously a theory we know so well, namely the concept of karma. What do I mean?

A person is not at all inclined, to start with, to take the idea of karma really seriously. If he has only a small mishap that hurts him, or anything at all happens to him, he sometimes gets furious, but at any rate he has antipathy for it. We encounter what we call our destiny with sympathy or antipathy. It cannot be any different in ordinary life, as it is absolutely essential that we feel sympathy for some of the occurrences of destiny and antipathy for others. To us, destiny is something that meets us from outside.

If we take the idea of karma seriously, we must really recognise our ego in our destiny and realise we ourselves are active in what happens to us through destiny; that we are the actual agents. When someone offends us it is certainly difficult to believe we are hidden behind the offender. For it may be necessary in physical life to punish the offence. But we must always keep a corner within us where we admit to ourselves, ‘Even when someone offends you it is you offending yourself, when someone hits you it is you hitting yourself, when unpleasant blows of destiny hit you, it is you, yourself, dealing yourself these blows.’ We forget that we are not only within our skin but are in our destiny; we forget we are within all the so-called chance happenings of our destiny.

It is very difficult really to acquire the attitude that one's own ego brings one one's destiny. But it is true that with our own ego we bring ourselves our destiny, and we get the impulses for this in the life between death and a new birth according to our earlier incarnations, so that we can bring ourselves our destiny. We have to unite with our destiny and, instead of warding off hard blows of destiny with antipathy, tell ourselves more and more often, ‘Through having this blow of destiny, that is, through meeting yourself in this blow of destiny, you are making yourself stronger, more vigorous and robust.’ It is more difficult to form a union with your destiny in this way than to resist it, but what we lose when our thought passes away can only be regained by drawing into ourselves, like this, what is outside us. We cannot stay in what is within our skin if the thought fades when we concentrate on it, but it will carry us out of ourselves if we have taken hold of our destiny, our karma, in the true sense. We thus awaken ourselves again. The thought dies, but we carry forth the identification we have grasped between our ego and our destiny, and it carries us about the world.

This composure with respect to our destiny, this sincere acceptance of destiny, is what gives us existence when we are outside our body. Obviously this does not need to alter our life on the physical plane. We cannot always do that. But the attitude we have to acquire in a corner of our soul must be there, for the moments when we really want to be able to live consciously outside our body.

And, on the topic of how the radical world-outlooks inform our own progressive evolution, such as those related to national instincts and feelings, I also came across this on the same drive today.

Well, they are active everywhere. I could imagine — the human intellect has such a strongly Luciferic tendency — that there may be people who say: Yes, it would certainly be much more sensible for the divine ordering of the world if these backward Spirits of Form were not causing havoc, indeed if they were not there at all ! I advise individuals who think like this also to consider as sensible people whether they could nourish themselves without at the same time filling their intestines with unpleasant substances. The one process is simply not possible without the other. Similarly it is not possible in the world for the things upon which the greatness and dignity of man depend to exist without their correlates.
...
Where, then, do we see backward Spirits of Form in action? Today in particular we see them active in the national chauvinisms which have spread over the whole world wherever the thoughts of men arise, not directly from the innermost core of human nature but out of the blood, out of what comes from the instincts.

In this connection there are two attitudes to nationality. One is this: a man scorns the normal Archai and simply lends himself to what the backward Spirits of Form achieve through the nationalities. He then grows up simply as a national, boasting in chauvinistic style of what he has become through having been born with national blood in his veins. His speech is a product of his nationality, his thoughts come to him in the language of his nationality, the very form of his thoughts too comes from the particular form of this language. He grows from the soil which the Spirits of Form have made out of the nationalities.

[he doesn't come back to the 2nd attitude to nationality, but I imagine it relates to the person who says it would be better if the backward SoF "were not there at all"]

If you want the link to the lectures quoted, I can provide them, but they go pretty deep into spiritual scientific topics which will be very hard to follow without more of a conceptual foundation in that area. I am open to discussing any of these topics in good faith, but I don't want to pretend like I am just throwing out speculations either. I wouldn't write what I am writing about the Christian "doctrines" unless I was convinced of their correctness at a deep level, informed by the spiritual science referenced above and what (admittedly little) experience with higher cognition that I have attained so far, where such inner orientations become critical for further progress.

[Federica]

I guess it may be helpful for me to step back and ask, what is at the core of this current discussion? What practical obstacle to your spiritual growth do you feel needs to be navigated here? It's not my intention to debate these deep matters of spiritual evolution, necessarily tied into Christian doctrine (and all other relgious teachings), if it's only a matter of intellectual curiosity or reluctant feelings. On the other hand, if the idea of wise spiritual powers guiding our evolution and using all 'evil' activities towards the fulfillment of Good, all unfree and tribal thoughts, feelings, actions, etc. in the evolution of individual freedom, is something you struggle to understand or find the proper context for in your current spiritual path, then I think it's worth discussing more. So what is the "current struggle" exactly?

At the core of the current discussion is the understanding of Feeling. This was the starting point. Understanding Feeling requires to discuss this:

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.

This intersection is the core of the current discussion. Why do you call it a debate now?
What makes you now think that it could be a matter of intellectual curiosity or reluctant feelings on my part?

What practical obstacles do I encounter: I haven’t encountered any real obstacles yet. I encounter tasks for now. The main task is to approach the views I am exposed to, here and with the things I am reading, and connect them in a wholeness that I can somehow keep contact with and track of. On second thought, I do struggle with this task. It is a difficult task for me, it goes slowly. It’s an objective struggle but I don’t feel the struggle. I am eager and happy to do that. I spend more time than my calendar would allow me to spend on that.

But are you basically saying that you only want to discuss more if there are things about the path I don’t get, so you can deliver the answer, but if I go into replying and discussing, this is proof of intellectual curiosity and reluctant feelings, and then you are not interested?

Federica,

For purposes of this discussion, I'm mostly interested with the inner obstacles you are facing on the intuitive thinking path, which will surely arise. When it seems like I am forcing you to overextend to the point where I am creating premature inner obstacles for you, then that's when I am reluctant to go further. This whole area of Christian doctrine is the hottest button topic for our time, even if it's not really evident at first. It really underlies all the obstacles we will face on the path. We are dealing with the deepest moral fabric of reality which is responsible for our existence and evolution, our outer and inner worlds.

Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word 'doctrine' and referenced specific ones like 'total depravity'. I use the word "doctrine" like I would use the word "philosophy", such as materialism or idealism - it's simply a perception-conception which is a symbol for an overarching Idea which is temporally extended, born of the eternal Spirit. The specific cultural manifestations over the last 2,000 years can be instructive, but are not really at issue here. If we can't inhabit the inner perspective of these Ideas, which most of us can't, then the best we can do is try to shift our thinking to orient from that eternal, spiritual pole of existence (where we live between death and rebirth). Understanding Feeling was the issue, but it was further narrowed to the following sentiment, which I have been responding to over the last few comments.

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.

Since I take the opposite position - we are those people - it could be called a debate. You further stated,

I don’t know if it's not at the border of being a little too much, both for me to stay tuned and for you to not half-regret what you are writing?

Perhaps I do half-regret writing it, for the reasons stated above, but not because I think the substance or spirit of what was written was incorrect. Most of all, none of this should be taken as moralism or dogma which is independent of rigorous logical thinking. It is all rooted in the deepest spiritual science. I am sure now that I did not make that clear enough before, if at all. It has been the most profound realization for me to discern the ways in which unprejudiced and independent spiritual scientific research leads one right back to the Wisdom of ancient mythology and spirituality, especially the Christian teachings (in their deep esoteric dimension). Dogma implies something which is substituted in once scientific reasoning cannot go further, and that's the opposite of what we are speaking of here. In fact, we cannot really understand the Christian teachings without the spiritual scientific foundation, just as we cannot understand the principles of 20th century theoretical physics without some background in its research.

I took a drive today and just 'happened' to open up an audio lecture with the following passage from Steiner, so I feel it should be shared and hopefully it will clarify what I have written before re: Karma and Christian teaching. As we have already established, Steiner has a much more living and insightful way of conveying these things, and these are live lectures he is giving to people without notes. It is beyond remarkable.

I will confess that I would never have understood the part about the Elohim breathing the living being of man into his mouth and nose [from Genesis], if I had not known beforehand that the breath of earthly human beings also contains the first germinal beginnings of the beings who will become human on Jupiter. But Jupiter human beings can only arise from the kind of breath that owes its existence to deeds that obey the ‘you shall’, and which are therefore moral actions.

Thus we see that through our earthly morality we take a creative part in the whole cosmic order. It is indeed a creative power, and we can see that spiritual science gives us a strong impulse for moral action by telling us that we are working against the creation of Jupiter human beings, if we do not act in a moral way on earth. This gives morality a very real value and makes its existence worthwhile. Our human conduct is very strongly formed by what we acquire through spiritual science, especially as we become acquainted with real secrets regarding the cosmos.
...
Everyone makes a certain discovery in the course of concentrating. If we place a thought in the centre of our consciousness and focus all our soul activity on it, we shall notice the thought growing stronger and stronger. Certainly it does. But then there comes a point where it does not get stronger any more but gets weaker and fades away. This is an experience lots of you will have had. The thought has to fade away, it has, as it were, to die away inside. For the kind of thoughts we have to begin with and the way we think, are through the instrument of the physical body, and we concentrate the kind of thinking we do by means of the instrument of the physical body until the moment the thought dies, then we slip out of the physical body.

We would go into the unconscious altogether if, parallel with this concentration exercise, we did not attempt to do something else to maintain our consciousness when we have slipped out of our physical body. What we have to do to maintain our consciousness when we are outside, is what we call leading a calm and composed life and accepting the things of the world calmly. We can do even more than accept things calmly. We can take seriously a theory we know so well, namely the concept of karma. What do I mean?

A person is not at all inclined, to start with, to take the idea of karma really seriously. If he has only a small mishap that hurts him, or anything at all happens to him, he sometimes gets furious, but at any rate he has antipathy for it. We encounter what we call our destiny with sympathy or antipathy. It cannot be any different in ordinary life, as it is absolutely essential that we feel sympathy for some of the occurrences of destiny and antipathy for others. To us, destiny is something that meets us from outside.

If we take the idea of karma seriously, we must really recognise our ego in our destiny and realise we ourselves are active in what happens to us through destiny; that we are the actual agents. When someone offends us it is certainly difficult to believe we are hidden behind the offender. For it may be necessary in physical life to punish the offence. But we must always keep a corner within us where we admit to ourselves, ‘Even when someone offends you it is you offending yourself, when someone hits you it is you hitting yourself, when unpleasant blows of destiny hit you, it is you, yourself, dealing yourself these blows.’ We forget that we are not only within our skin but are in our destiny; we forget we are within all the so-called chance happenings of our destiny.

It is very difficult really to acquire the attitude that one's own ego brings one one's destiny. But it is true that with our own ego we bring ourselves our destiny, and we get the impulses for this in the life between death and a new birth according to our earlier incarnations, so that we can bring ourselves our destiny. We have to unite with our destiny and, instead of warding off hard blows of destiny with antipathy, tell ourselves more and more often, ‘Through having this blow of destiny, that is, through meeting yourself in this blow of destiny, you are making yourself stronger, more vigorous and robust.’ It is more difficult to form a union with your destiny in this way than to resist it, but what we lose when our thought passes away can only be regained by drawing into ourselves, like this, what is outside us. We cannot stay in what is within our skin if the thought fades when we concentrate on it, but it will carry us out of ourselves if we have taken hold of our destiny, our karma, in the true sense. We thus awaken ourselves again. The thought dies, but we carry forth the identification we have grasped between our ego and our destiny, and it carries us about the world.

This composure with respect to our destiny, this sincere acceptance of destiny, is what gives us existence when we are outside our body. Obviously this does not need to alter our life on the physical plane. We cannot always do that. But the attitude we have to acquire in a corner of our soul must be there, for the moments when we really want to be able to live consciously outside our body.

And, on the topic of how the radical world-outlooks inform our own progressive evolution, such as those related to national instincts and feelings, I also came across this on the same drive today.

Well, they are active everywhere. I could imagine — the human intellect has such a strongly Luciferic tendency — that there may be people who say: Yes, it would certainly be much more sensible for the divine ordering of the world if these backward Spirits of Form were not causing havoc, indeed if they were not there at all ! I advise individuals who think like this also to consider as sensible people whether they could nourish themselves without at the same time filling their intestines with unpleasant substances. The one process is simply not possible without the other. Similarly it is not possible in the world for the things upon which the greatness and dignity of man depend to exist without their correlates.
...
Where, then, do we see backward Spirits of Form in action? Today in particular we see them active in the national chauvinisms which have spread over the whole world wherever the thoughts of men arise, not directly from the innermost core of human nature but out of the blood, out of what comes from the instincts.

In this connection there are two attitudes to nationality. One is this: a man scorns the normal Archai and simply lends himself to what the backward Spirits of Form achieve through the nationalities. He then grows up simply as a national, boasting in chauvinistic style of what he has become through having been born with national blood in his veins. His speech is a product of his nationality, his thoughts come to him in the language of his nationality, the very form of his thoughts too comes from the particular form of this language. He grows from the soil which the Spirits of Form have made out of the nationalities.

[he doesn't come back to the 2nd attitude to nationality, but I imagine it relates to the person who says it would be better if the backward SoF "were not there at all"]

If you want the link to the lectures quoted, I can provide them, but they go pretty deep into spiritual scientific topics which will be very hard to follow without more of a conceptual foundation in that area. I am open to discussing any of these topics in good faith, but I don't want to pretend like I am just throwing out speculations either. I wouldn't write what I am writing about the Christian "doctrines" unless I was convinced of their correctness at a deep level, informed by the spiritual science referenced above and what (admittedly little) experience with higher cognition that I have attained so far, where such inner orientations become critical for further progress.

Thank you Ashvin, for the lecture excerpts. Indeed they are flawlessly timely in connection with the core of this discussion. The lectures are easy to find, I have some traveling time coming up and might seize that opportunity to see if I can read them.

Regarding the rest of the discussion, I have written a detailed clarification and statement, but I am now deciding to not post it because I cannot discern with enough clarity what is what, what is true, what is supposed, what the motives might be. So I prefer to let go of it.

.

[AshvinP]

Regarding the rest of the discussion, I have written a detailed clarification and statement, but I am now deciding to not post it because I cannot discern with enough clarity what is what, what is true, what is supposed, what the motives might be. So I prefer to let go of it.

.

No problem, Federica. If you prefer to send it by PM, that's fine too.

Have a good trip!

[AshvinP]

Regarding the rest of the discussion, I have written a detailed clarification and statement, but I am now deciding to not post it because I cannot discern with enough clarity what is what, what is true, what is supposed, what the motives might be. So I prefer to let go of it.

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No problem, Federica. If you prefer to send it by PM, that's fine too.

Have a good trip!

I also want to make clear that I know you weren't advocating for some complete renunciation of all Earthly identifications on this thread. If anything, my caution has only been the 'slippery slope' argument, where small desires, feelings, and thoughts can snowball into bigger and bigger ones if we aren't prudent. Except the slope is much steeper than we can know with the conscious intellect. As mentioned on the other thread, our entire being is woven out of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic impulses, which here could be associated with the nationalistic-karmic and individualistic-freedom attitudes. And, as also mentioned there, the intuitive thinking path requires we lean even more into the Lucifer impulse than we otherwise would. This is where great spiritual egoism can emerge if we aren't careful, and where reasoned faith in the moral orientation of the Christ impulse will become indispensable. I fight this battle often in my own meditations. It can be a more pernicious threat because it's more subtle and harder to notice for those who are spiritually oriented. We may feel safe that we have jumped out the materialistic Ahrimanic boat and are striving for the higher worlds. But we are in a stage now where extreme one sidedness to the Luciferic tendency can practically wind us up in a similar position to following the Ahrimanic tendency - stuck firmly in the past, perhaps even overshooting into the far ancient past, because we are striving for a future which simply cannot be manifest yet. A future which will only be manifest when much larger portions of humanity have embraced higher spiritual knowledge and consciously ideated this future into its incarnate existence. We then also run the risk of purely egoistic spiritual strivings, i.e. black magic. So this is the deeper meaning when it is said, "strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."