AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jul 18, 2022 10:19 pmFederica wrote: ↑Sat Jul 16, 2022 10:46 pm From here the challenge is then to change the direction of exploration, from horizontal to vertical. To discover the new underwater world that remains veiled to the swimmer. Or the plant that magically grows out of the seed. Is there anything that I can say about that process? When diving, it's as if we are not dense anymore, density seems to flow out of the body. It’s like our dense body is now all spread out before our eyes on the shelves of the sea bottom and we are left empty and light inside, turned inside-out like a glove, in a sense. All our heaviness comes out there on display. That’s why it’s a silent display. Underwater, the outside has no sound anymore. As density flows out, sound flows into the resonant, empty inner space. It’s the sound of our breath. It’s like the outer side - the fish, the rocks, the plants - tend to match, to contour, or to illustrate, the inner side turned inside-out.
So maybe taking death-steps starts with a similar kind of inversion? Turning our inner life inside-out and matching it with the landscape? Putting on display the secret agreements we once made with ourselves and soon forgot, taking inventory of all the odd scaffolding we once put up and never dismantled. The old arrangements, the consoling beliefs, and how all these originated as landscape adjustments. All this could be viable sacrificial material to fuel the death and resurrection process. Maybe we realize a matching feature, it clicks, and the ego-chunk burns down to fuel a new death-step into a new sublayer… and maybe that’s how we become familiar with the landscape, to the point that we can take some active steps in designing our spiritual trajectory.
Clearly there is nothing of substance, not even any practical how-to findings in all this. It’s just an attempt to take a little more active standpoint than waiting for the next ideas to understand, by reformulating what's written. I will see if it's useful exercise or not. Thanks for the inspiration!
Federica,
I imagine Cleric is getting around to a response on this soon, so I wanted to make a brief comment on something which most likely he is not already writing or planning to write, although maybe I'm wrong about that. It's something that flashed into my mind when reading your post. I was following your metaphorical restatement about the situation and approaching the inversion horizon, or the vertical dive below, and wondered, "what is she doing with her activity in the process of making these connections and wrestling with them?", which are very insightful and accurate connections from my perspective.
"Even in the womb, Jacob struggled with his brother; when he became a man,he even fought with God. Yes, he wrestled with the angel and won."
We have mentioned the Christ impulse to Self-consciousness a few times recently. It's incredible how powerful this spiritual tool can be even from a strictly conceptual reasoning perspective. Let's take the force of gravity you reference. We have Newtonian mechanics, where mostly we are concerned with how one physical body can influence another upon some direct interaction. Then we discovered more about magnetism and electricity, in which direct physical contact is mostly missing, but we can picture some material exchange going on over relatively short distances to make these force interactions possible. Then we come to gravity, where large masses act on each other at a distance and there is really no material medium to picture whatsoever. We only speak of it in terms of abstract influences or 'curvatures' of spacetime. We even refer to invisible objects, "black holes", which are critical to the functioning of the visible Cosmos.
So there is a process of natural scientists spiritualizing the material interactions going on, but it remains mostly subconscious. We are not only discovering or changing abstract laws which pre-exist our activity 'out there', but actively imbuing natural appearances with spirit through our activity. Then we even come to QM and 'spooky action at a distance', where the interaction seems to defy previously assumed material constraints, like the speed of light, and it became even more explicit our own involvement in the entire process. How many of the scientists stop to reflect on what they are doing with their thought-activity in this way, how they are coming back to laws of spirit, which encompass that very same activity, from apearances and laws of nature? How much more progress towards living knowledge would have been made if they put as much thinking energy into such reflection as they did into toying around with abstract models and applied material pursuits? These are all acts of wrestling with the God of Nature to give birth to the Spirit of Nature, but only if they are fueled by the power of self-consciousness.
Steiner wrote:Now there are two possible ways of describing a being which is at the same time Spirit and Nature. The one is: I exhibit the laws of nature which are active in Reality. Or, I show how the spirit acts in order to come to these natural laws. One and the same thing guides me in both cases. The one shows me conformity to law as it is active in nature; the other shows me what the spirit does in order to represent to itself this same conformity to law. In the one case I pursue natural science, in the other spiritual science. How these two are connected, Schelling describes in an interesting way. He says: ‘The necessary tendency of all natural science is to ascend from nature to intelligence. This and nothing else underlies the endeavour to bring theory into natural phenomena. The highest perfection of natural science would be the complete spiritualisation of all natural laws into laws of observation and thought. Phenomena (the material) must completely vanish, and laws alone (the formal )remain. Hence it happens that the more conformity to law is brought into nature herself the more the veils vanish, phenomena themselves become more spiritual and finally disappear altogether.
Well the natural scientists aren't the only ones who fail to find their vertical thrust into space, or dive into deep sea, for lack of self-consciousness. I know it still takes effort for me to remember this is the most useful tool when I am contemplating things. There are not only natural phenomena, but cultural and individual soul phenomena. What is the deeper lawful character by which these phenomena transform? What sort of supersensible activities must be responsible for such transformations? What are the dynamics by which these operate? When and how did they come into manifestation? In what places do they manifest? What is my role in their manifestation. We can gain significant vertical thrust simply through these sorts of deeper who, what, when, where, and how. The 'why' questions deal more with the inward meditative path to higher planes of consciousness, yet we can certainly attain to deeper layers of 'why' even with our conceptual activity.
It is very important that we never feel we need to abandon natural science or the spirit of its method. We don't simply want to discover a world of spiritual entities and say, "here are the beings responsible for everything around us and within us", but to scientifically discover how they are responsible, which necessarily involves a holistic survey of human spiritual evolution. We want to self-consciously continue the process of spiritualizing the natural world and its principles in a precise and disciplined way. A critical inversion is when we realize how we have only arrived at the beginning of a genuine science of physics, biology, physiology, anatomy, nutrition, agriculture, education, etc. Instead of looking for a "theory of everything", we are experiencing the fact that we have the reality of almost nothing, yet. It is not an easy path to pursue, because, while people will tolerate all sorts of talk about higher worlds and spiritual beings, they are not at all tolerant when mainstream scientific consensus and practical methods of dealing with outer phenomena, especially things like medical issues for ex., are questioned.
We can also apply this shift into a novel direction for aesthetics. I briefly shared Steiner's new method of painting on the other thread. He also developed new methods of dance and architecture. You have probably heard of the Waldorf schools, which impart new methods of teaching based on spiritual understanding of the human being and its modern course of development. He outlines a 'threefold social order' for modern socioeconomic and political systems. There is so much unexplored territory in outer nature and culture, which deepens in proportion with our own spiritual consciousness. Steiner makes clear this isn't something monopolized by his own research, but something which should be expanded upon greatly by future spiritual researchers. So these are all more outward, logical, scientific ways to deepen the dive and reach a certain 'lightness of being'. It is essential we not only delve inwards for the spiritual, but also couple that with contemplation of Nature, Culture, and how spiritual understanding can improve and transfigure our individual and collective interaction with them.
Ashvin,
I’m following your reasoning well. I see that you want to help me, but I’m not seeing in which different ways the descriptions should have been provided, in order to escape your warning. It’s not coming together. Yes, I was unsatisfied with the supposed usefulness of my post, and with it altogether, still I felt I had to submit it, because that was the reality of how I was able, or unable, to address the question, and I had to, or wanted to account for that. Yes, wrestling is an accurate description of what I was doing. Another one is fumbling in the dark. And yes, these metaphors are considered from the third-person vantage point. This is all accurate. I have failed to give any account of my inner activity in the process of exploring the question of death before death. In hindsight, I feel I have been giving so much account of personal struggles and exposed my inner activity to such an extent in these discussions, that if it sometimes happens that I dabble in wrestling with concepts, it should be admissible? Probably it even gives people a break. Don’t get me wrong please, I do think it’s been to a good extent necessary for me to play by these rules, for the double reason that this philosophy is about abandoning the intellectual third-person perspective, and that I am in this respect the last one, the ignorant one. And I do feel a deep gratitude for the unreal chance to have these real conversations that I had been missing for so long without knowing it. I know deep inside that the value I am accessing in this context is so worth the effort I am paying. With all this being said, how did you mean I could have done it?