Re: Whirlpool's core/first motion
Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2022 8:56 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 12:21 pm
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.htmCognate: 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.
Steiner wrote: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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