Federica wrote: ↑Sat Oct 29, 2022 8:34 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Oct 29, 2022 1:49 pm
These are very pressing issues for people to confront today. Especially the conflation of willfully suppressing thoughtful, dispassionate, penetrating inquiries into psycho-physical differentiations, for some sort of 'anti-racist' or similar virtue. It would be quite absurd to suggest we should avoid such inquiries in the realm of nature's differentiations, but when it comes to the human individual and culture, it becomes a sign of a 'progressive' attitude, when in fact nothing could be more retrogressive. This is, of course, rooted in the modern tendency to isolate the thinking individual and its cultural institutions from the evolving World Process. That, in turn, is rooted in a latent egoism which gives rise to antipathies, fears, anxieties, etc. concerning the depths of the human soul and what archetypal shadowy tendencies it harbors. It is the "I"-being's subordination to the impulses, passions, and thoughts of the lower desire body. This isn't virtue but a veiled, intellectualized animalism - one which fails to differentiate the psycho-physical organization from the eternal soul-spirit, of which the former is merely the instrument. This idolatrous tendency then gets projected into 'reality itself' and serves as the basis for outrage when precise inquiries are made into the differentiated streams of psycho-physical development, since the latter is practically equated with the sum total of what it means to be a human being. As usual, this inverting tendency is exactly what will prevent humanity from lucidly and productively addressing the inequalities and injustices which it only
dreams of being concerned about.
Et voilà, Ashvin, in French one could say, you have put your two feet in the dish
As usual, this inverting tendency is exactly what will prevent humanity from lucidly and productively addressing the inequalities and injustices which it only dreams of being concerned about.
Is there pessimism, or slight exasperation, in that future tense, in your overall tone? Maybe it's my wrong reading.
But it’s true, it’s becoming a common stance. It happens in the workplace for example, that people are not keen to address cultural differences. They have adopted the mindset that because we are all human beings, common ground is all that matters, and all one should talk about in that area.
Federica,
I suppose there is, but I get much less exasperated by it now than I used to. I see now more clearly how these sociopolitical, etc. issues link in to all the basic phenomenology of thinking we are always discussing here, and are symptoms of keeping our pre-dialectical thinking in the blind spot. I shouldn't really get any more exasperated by it than with the analytic idealist or mystical 'non-dualist' who often does a similar thing as the 'SJ warriors', i.e. resorts to labels like "Steinarian", implies spiritual thinking is a cult, and is so irrationally fearful of it that they would rather put those discussing it on an "ignore list" than examine their own inner activity. There's that exasperated tone creeping up again
There is a real Kabuki theater quality to all of it. I was watching a sports game the other day and everything said by the commentators on camera came off as being so staged and inauthentic (and this was when they
weren't speaking of SJ issues, although there is plenty of that in the sports broadcasts now as well). Then it dawned on me that they are perfectly aware they come off this way, that the viewers know they come off this way, and yet they keep doing it because being inauthentic is all part of the 'game' now. It is has become a
virtue in popular culture to play this game and to only focus on perfecting one's playing of it.
Sadly, this seems to be increasingly the case on metaphysical forums, and intellectual academia in general, as well. People know to some extent that they are not really penetrating to any deeper realties with the abstract metaphysical speculations. They know, or are easily reminded, that they are discussing the same exact theoretical 'problems' discussed by the most clever philosophical minds hundreds of years ago, with no resolution. They can be reminded that the models being discussed are extremely removed from our inner soul life and activity of willing-feeling-thinking. It's quite obvious that there are no practical considerations to speak of with these models - if the perfect, unassailable model was found, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to anyone's life. But they keep with it because it's familiar, self-aggrandizing, and it's all part of the dream-like game!
Beyond the separation and fear in which this is grounded, and the flattening of being human to being a physiology with passions and needs, I would like to think that there's also a way to look at this phenomenon historically, maybe as an opposite reaction or a misguided, guilty reaction - it’s in Western cultures that this is happening - to an epoch of colonialism and to other known events of the recent past. Is this a possible factor?
Ultimately, I think we need to penetrate to the spiritual roots. There will definitely be many correlations between the outer appearances, including historical events. The problem is when we try to draw causative links between the correlations across the 'horizontal' sensory-conceptual plane. I used a metaphor in an essay previously:
viewtopic.php?t=773
Imagine we are two-dimensional beings, beholding conscious phenomena - shapes, sizes, etc. - on a flat plane. The only shapes we can discern are one-dimensional lines and zero-dimensional points. We observe a curious point who manages to leave our plane existence for the third dimension, becoming super-sensible from our two-dimensional perspective. Many years later, the Point reappears in our plane universe. We are stunned! The Point has manifested from Divine realms to speak to us of its journey within the higher worlds. These tales of the Point are encoded into the bits of our two-dimensional plane for posterity. Many more years pass and our plane descendents begin to mock our tales. "There is no higher-dimensional world", they say, "you silly old people have fantasized these journeys of the Point". They continue, "our modern inquiries reveal that these points are 'virtual particles' which disappear and reappear continuously to and from the plane's quantum void." Adding insult to injury, they conclude, "our plane-ancestors invented higher worlds to fill the gap in their own knowledge of disappearing and reappearing points, but now we have explained this dynamic away". The triumphal return of the Divine Point has apparently been demystified. It went from a "miracle of God" to the "cosmic singularity", the "abiogenesis of single-celled organisms" from an "entropic soup", and the "emergence" of sentient life.
When it comes to our inner world of four-dimensional processes (3-D mental objects transforming in time), we now assume there are lines and points - desires, feelings, and thoughts - which actually disappear and reappear by their very nature. The rational intellect declares that it is silly superstition to suppose these thought-points travel in super-sensible realms when we cannot perceive them. It says our thought-points are virtual particles appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, and we accept that unquestionably as a viable scientific explanation for their existence within our experience. It is simply assumed by most, subconsciously, that these thought-experiences have been demystified. Yet, our unprejudiced logical reasoning demands a more coherent explanation from us. It demands we take notice of how physical objects do not simply disappear when they are obstructed from our view and the same must hold true for mental objects. There must be an entire super-sensible path these thought-points traverse before we perceive their final destination as concepts in our inner experience. Tracing back the normal thinking-flow with higher Thinking, then, is revealing the subconscious forces which structure our normal thoughts, feelings, and desires. We must only resist the temptation to ignore or cease our own logical reasoning out of egoic pride and convenience.
Steiner also makes this point in various places, specifically with regards to history. He critiqued the 'pragmatic' history of his day which tried to explain all current events in terms of the events which just preceded them. (this is not to be confused with pragmatic philosophy, which is certainly aligned with philosophy of spiritual activity). The problem is that the vertical dimension, i.e. all that takes place within the spiritual planes nested 'above' the historical events, including the periods of death-rebirth for each individual, is ignored. These supra-sensory events, which seed our collective and individual Karma, have much more to tell us about the current state of affairs than exoteric history. With that said, there certainly could be a Karmic connection between Western colonialism and the current SJ oscillation - most likely there is - but I don't think we are really explaining much of anything by drawing that parallel. This is why I would focus more on the archetypal soul-forces which remain buried deep within the subconscious of most individuals today and therefore get projected outwards.
