Re: Whirlpool's core/first motion
Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2022 10:36 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 10:53 pmFederica wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 9:13 pmIt's really being a struggle for me to get across this point! Earlier in this thread, it made me look like I was mystical, and now, like I see myself as a ghost floating around without gender and nationality. Of course I am aware that these qualities are operating in me, and I wouldn’t say that I hope or expect to decondition from higher beings by becoming more conscious of them and their ideational currents. If I ever become more conscious in that way, would I see it as a deconditioning? I hope not...AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Jul 24, 2022 7:22 pm
Right, but let's always remember we are those "people". If we feel that we aren't conditioned by our gender, race, or nationality, then we are simply keeping that influence subconscious (and it's not easy to bring it to consciousness). At the end of the day, we are speaking of the nation as Idea, and as Steiner mentioned in the linked lecture, Ideas don't just hang in the air, but belong to ideational beings. They are experienced from the first-person perspective of such beings, not unlike we experience our own ideas from our first-person perspective. And there are important goals for humanity which are accomplished by such beings ideating national currents of willing, feeling, thinking. Yet, by becoming more conscious of these beings and their ideational currents, we also decondition from them. It's always good to view another human being, first and foremost, as an image of the universal Spirit, transcending any transient identifications, but we don't get a complete understanding of the human individual in that way. For the latter, we must also try to discern these nested layers of influence, of course without any prejudice or moral judgment.
...
The reason I mention it this way is because, in my own case, I have often found myself looking out at people and the world and wondering, "how could they be so silly and ignorant as to become radically nationalistic, racialistic, decriers of the 'evil patriarchy', etc". We can also connect it with what we find often on these forums and the need to move through the Zodiac of world-outlooks - "how is this guy so ignorant as to still be a materialist (or an analytic idealist)!" It's hard not to do that these days when so many people are content to live their lives like ostriches with their heads in the sand. What I try to do lately is immediately sense how that radicalism may also live within me, only buried deep within the subconscious. Just like the 'ordinary men', I could even commit crimes against humanity given the right circumstances and a lack of living, i.e. conscious, connection with higher Ideal-Beings.
...
Ashvin,
Your last comments here have prompted me to rethink the whole idea one more time and this is how I see it at this point. There seems to be a few different things mixed up here. One is the Ideas that separate people nationwise, or groupwise through feelings. This feeling aspect is the piece I was missing, that I gathered from the lecture. The ideational beings create national currents of feeling (not of willing or thinking, as I understand it) and acknowledging these does not prevent us from considering ourselves a ‘citizen of the world’ at the same time, by virtue of sharing equivalent thinking potential. A very different thing happens when one lets that group feeling ‘dominate in the worst possible way’. When ‘people feel themselves as only belonging to a certain group, all kinds of conflicts arise’. And that's the problem: when some people - and I would argue, we are not those people - find themselves going all the way down that road, to the point of creating great suffering or committing crimes. They behave under the unconscious command of a group current of feeling, distorted and taken to the extreme. They don’t take the way of freedom, they succumb to the way of karma.
Here I understand that the space of feelings, because it lies between consciousness and unconsciousness, is the balancing factor that could weigh us down the karma way or lift us up the freedom way. The threshold between conscious and unconscious is the pivot, and we can improve the balancing of our whole 'feeling space' by transforming it through thinking. Both ordinary and imaginative thinking should help, by introspection and concentration. Here below I have made an attempt to illustrate this process. Thinking is the fully conscious activity that can bring all feelings closer to center, rather than drag them over as much as possible on the conscious side. When this happens, conscious feelings are de-intellectualized, brightened, attuned to one another in the center. The heart-felt ones can move towards the center, while other ones won’t make it and will dissolve. On the other end, unconscious feelings will be either dropped, or lightened, and connected with the heartfelt ones around the center, as they are brought into awareness.
https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHoy91Nas/view
https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHpPuwixY/view
https://www.canva.com/design/DAFHpBXX_fM/view
With the sketches, I have tried to convey a sense that it’s less about dragging all feelings on the conscious side (the end balance would be off) and more about concentrating them all within the freedom zone. Not only unconscious, but also conscious feelings need thourough ‘plumbing’ review, or rework. If we do that effort, we end up in sketch 2. We have not affected the subconscious yet, hence we might be out of balance for that reason, but still better off, compared to a perfect balance with highly polarized masses in the feeling space. In sketch 3 the improvement has continued, with some more efforts to bring both sides to center, through thinking. Not all that matters is accouted for in these images, I know, and of course they look like, and are, an intellectual visualization. Still I have tried to maintain connection with how these ideas feel in my heart (with the exception of the third one, which can't be personal observation for the part of the imaginative thinking action on unconscious feelings.)
Done this side inquiry on feelings, triggered by the Steiner lecture, I want to go back to the initial question of the Ideas that separate people in groups, such as for example nations, or, as another example, the group of those who hold a materialistic position. Keeping in mind that these ideas, or positions, can become ingrained in the ego through feelings to an extreme extent, we could distinguish two ways to hold them.
One way is to adopt an idea as a transient movement. At a certain time, in relation to certain occurrences, we adopt the position by primarily thinking, by reasoning. We make a little place for it in our ego-space, we carry it with us, until it possibly becomes unfitting, and we leave it. In the meantime, we have not merged in feeling with the position. For example, a while ago I read the popular book ‘The power of now'. Upon reading it, my position was ‘He’s right! Let’s wake up!’ Later my opinion changed. I could change it easily because I had not let the position become much entangled with feelings and take over that space. It was primarily a matter of reasoning. I had not used it to represent or replace my identity. An opposite way would be when a position is adopted as if it was a transplant in our mental and emotional flesh, through merger with feelings. Then we become identified with it, and the feelings elicited, conscious and unconscious, could become dangerous, if negative or negatively wired, for example entitlement, pride, superiority, blind submission to group, or else. Here it’s clear that what’s dangerous is not the position, or idea, in itself, but the deep merging of it with negative or distorted feelings. It's a different story when we cultivate and merge our ideas with love, gratitude and other gracious feelings, like along the path of transformative thinking. Then it's a conscious deepening of the ideas in virtuous feelings, not a free fall into the agitations of the obscure swirls of feeling.
So if someone tells me that they love The power of now, they have adopted those ideas, even went to an Eckart Tolle retreat, or that they are materialist, it’s not hard for me to consider that they are not silly. It is actually extremely easy. There are so many variables, pre-conditions, exposures, karma, as you would say, to explain our transient opinions. On the contrary, let’s say they got mega tattoos of Eckart’s face all over their body, or they signal in some other way that they have entirely merged the position within their feeling space (which also makes them fully ready to act upon that activated feeling substance) In this case of radical stance and radicalized behavior - ‘radical’ here in a very different sense compared to how I used the word about you recently, I’m following your use here - I would allow myself against your advise to think that I am more advanced than that. Again, it’s not the position in itself that I’m judging. It’s instead because the position has been locked into place through merger with feelings, often independently from reason.
Indeed, I would consider that I'm not making the same mistake they are making, however there would be no triumph in that. No sense of deserving better. Partly because, after all, I could be in a similar stance in respect to some other ideas, stuck in unconscious feelings in ways I don’t realize. But more importantly, because I know that they are doing their best with what they have. Even the most abject criminals, as disturbing as this thought may be, are in certain sense doing their best, dealing with life and what they have access to in their life. Could this be the piece that you would refuse? But if you do, then you are forced to imagine yourself as a war criminal, to ward off the third-person perspective. I ward it off in a different way. That is to say, I could consider myself more advanced than others in some given area. However the reason I have worked my way to that point is that I was lucky to benefit from enough positive conditions, or karma, to support me. I feel grateful, hence responsible, because I am fully aware I have found myself in favorable conditions all along. I have not created these conditions.
From here, I could then say ‘Had I not received such help I could have become a war criminal’ but this doesn't help much, fantasizing on what could have happened. Neither helps the thought ‘I could become that tomorrow’. It remains a theoretical thought. Let’s face it, I am not a war criminal, and I’ll never be. So instead of picturing myself as such, I prefer to acknowledge the struggles of others, as they face their karma and their life situations. It’s a more real approach, I think. Sensing that I have unconscious tendencies that could make me a war criminal is abstract and improbable. But that a real war criminal has acted under certain conditions, certain karma, and was conducted by unconscious emotions and forces towards certain behaviors sounds more like a fact to my ear.
This view is also an opening to make room in our heart for forgiveness to happen, should the situation arise. If we instead try to picture ourselves, and anyone else, as potential criminals who happen to be virtuous by accident, then I don’t even get what the meaning of forgiveness could be. Few people here must be as lost in the Bible as I am, however didn’t Jesus say something about criminal behavior and forgiveness that could fit well here? Anyway, I am perplexed, when I read that you try to sense the criminal potential in yourself. In the meantime, the reality is that you are offering help to people on this forum that could let them change their condition, transform their ideas, just as you did for yourself. Why not consider that you only can do that from your position of being a little more advanced than them, in that given domain?
Lastly, this view also frees us from aggravating our feeling space with disappointment or sadness, about the people who keep their head stuck in the sand. Letting them take the driver seat in our feeling space so they can instill disappointment in it, won’t change the reality for them in any positive way. However It does change it for us, in a negative one. If we instead consider that those people are navigating life at the best they can, it’s easier and more joyful to become a living positive condition in their life, maybe the exact one they were missing in order to improve next time. Conversely, if we say “we are those people” then we paradoxically give more way to karma, hence we become somehow justified in, and prompted to, the feeling of disappointment for instance, when we see that karma, again, is keeping their head down under the sand.
.