Seflf-causality of the reality of consciousness.

[Stranger]

Thanks Cleric, very inspiring.

[AshvinP]

Thanks Cleric, very inspiring.

I want to add something here as well, which may be helpful. Let's say we are in a museum browsing through galleries of paintings, but there are no names attached to them. So we are confronted with beautiful landscapes, portraits, etc., and weaving colors which speak to our soul-experience of joys and sufferings, but the gallery as a whole remains fragmented into the particular paintings, which are rather dissonant with each other. However, if we manage to discern certain characteristic color palettes, techniques, themes, etc. in some of the paintings, we start tracing them back to the soul-life of the living individuality - his own joys and sufferings, his temperament, his biography, his ideas - who incarnated-impressed his spiritual activity into all of them. Now we have triangulated the living Idea who brings richly meaningful coherence to all the otherwise fragmented and dissonant paintings.

It is the same principle with the fragmented sensory-conceptual forms of the world we experience and think about, which have been impressed through the spiritual activity of concentrically nested "I"-beings along the vertical Time-axis who comprise our higher Self. In that sense, it is our own subconscious higher spiritual activity which is constantly shaping and re-shaping the phenomenal world. We find the concrete meeting place of that higher activity and our lower ego in our life of human thinking, which is a mediating link between the Divine and Earthly. Our intellectual activity is a crystallized form of this higher activity, yet certainly embedded within its greater flow. Especially with artistic and innovative thinking, we discern how the deeper layers of our intuitive, inspired, and imaginative spiritual activity can impress into the sensory spectrum and become objective manifestations with creative power. Previously you referenced this deep intuition as follows:

But even deeper than that, by agreeing to live as alters and undergo the suffering and troubles of our human lives we agree to participate and contribute to making the very existence of the reality of consciousness possible, we participate in and agree with the choice of the MAL to exist which would not be possible without the evolution of consciousness with our participation in its inevitable suffering. Simply speaking, we say “yes” to the choice of the MAL as conscious reality to exist.

So the living thinking path, as Cleric has often expressed and illustrated, is the fleshing out of this deep intuition through our human "I" in a firstly intellectual-philosophical, secondly metaphorical-imaginative, and thirdly precise scientific way. It is a science imbued with feeling and which motivates the will. We really start to take everything we had previously expressed to ourselves in dim and fragmented concepts more magically and seriously. The extent of our constant participation in spiritual evolution, at our individual level, the level of human collectives, and the level of Nature and the Earth as a whole, comes alive in previously unsuspected, unimagined ways. Many of the most simple things we experience and do on a daily basis, which we generally take for granted and feel to understand well, are revealed as Divine mysteries which humanity is just beginning to unveil.

[Federica]

Echoing today’s remark by Cleric about the tenor of my comments to Stranger’s theory - tenor that clearly pertains to my comments only - I admit that I have written them from a place of irritation that, beyond being inappropriate to fruitful dialogue in general, has inevitably biased my viewpoint and reaction to the theory in the thread. I regret that weakness, and I apologize to you, Stranger, for that.

No worries, Federica, we all can still learn valuable lessons even from this kind of criticism coming from limited perspectives of places of confrontation or irritation.

Since we got into the apologizing mode, I have to make a confession: I'm a former member Eugene I. I lost my access to my older accounts, so I started from scratch as a new member Stranger. I went through a period of spiritual transformation over the last year that changed my views on many topics, including philosophical views and the Steiner's philosophy in particular where I now see a lot of value and truth in it. Recalling our history of heated debates and opposition on this forum, I wanted to clear the karma that I created and apologize, particularly to Dana, Cleric and Ashvin, for any wrongdoings and wrong wordings, and thank them for opening to me the new horizons in the spiritual philosophy. On the other hand, I still hold the nondual vision or reality rooted in my first-person spiritual experience which is now naturally melded with the vertically-hierarchical perspective, and so I do not see any contradiction between the nondual and anthroposophical paradigms and experiences anymore and I believe that they complement each other and perfectly align with each other when viewed and understood correctly from a higher-level all-inclusive perspective. I'm still not planning to actively participate in this forum as I want to focus on my spiritual practice, I only wanted to share this hypothesis of self-causality for anyone who wants to explore it.

Eugene,

I’m happy you are back, and I hope that your future participation will be denser than you foresee today. Browsing the forum, I’ve come across some of those old debates. For me they have been, and still are, an invaluable resource to approach the key topics, explore them in depth from all angles, in search of the interrelations that allow the forming of an integrated view. Hoping everyone is ok with the wild quoting here below - the exact context of the discussions is less important. It's just to show that, for better or worse, you have remained present in the forum’s thoughts during this break. Clearly, you have been missed!

Eugene would say that…

Some time ago, when I had my ongoing spats with Eugene…

It reminds me of Eugene...

…Eugene (when he was here)...

I suppose if Eugene puts forth…

If you are here Eugene, I must ask…

I am thinking of you Eugene

[Stranger]

Eugene,

I’m happy you are back, and I hope that your future participation will be denser than you foresee today. Browsing the forum, I’ve come across some of those old debates. For me they have been, and still are, an invaluable resource to approach the key topics, explore them in depth from all angles, in search of the interrelations that allow the forming of an integrated view. Hoping everyone is ok with the wild quoting here below - the exact context of the discussions is less important. It's just to show that, for better or worse, you have remained present in the forum’s thoughts during this break. Clearly, you have been missed!

Thank you, Federica . Well, what can I say? It may sound banal but I’ll still say it I guess my reluctance to participate comes from the realization that the usefulness of purely philosophical discourse is rather limited (but this is not to say that it is altogether useless). The key is the spiritual practice, persistent and meticulous work on the inner transformation of one’s internal state of consciousness and, by doing that, penetrating through the egoic bubble and opening one’s mind to a larger scales and depths of the reality. But once that is in place, philosophy can definitely help to analyze and clear some misunderstandings that we inherit from our previous developmental stages, and point to new territories on the map, but then one has to actually undertake the travel using the map. So, philosophy is like a medicine that should be taken in appropriate but not excessive doses.

[mikekatz]

Eugene,

I’m happy you are back, and I hope that your future participation will be denser than you foresee today. Browsing the forum, I’ve come across some of those old debates. For me they have been, and still are, an invaluable resource to approach the key topics, explore them in depth from all angles, in search of the interrelations that allow the forming of an integrated view. Hoping everyone is ok with the wild quoting here below - the exact context of the discussions is less important. It's just to show that, for better or worse, you have remained present in the forum’s thoughts during this break. Clearly, you have been missed!

Thank you, Federica . Well, what can I say? It may sound banal but I’ll still say it I guess my reluctance to participate comes from the realization that the usefulness of purely philosophical discourse is rather limited (but this is not to say that it is altogether useless). The key is the spiritual practice, persistent and meticulous work on the inner transformation of one’s internal state of consciousness and, by doing that, penetrating through the egoic bubble and opening one’s mind to a larger scales and depths of the reality. But once that is in place, philosophy can definitely help to analyze and clear some misunderstandings that we inherit from our previous developmental stages, and point to new territories on the map, but then one has to actually undertake the travel using the map. So, philosophy is like a medicine that should be taken in appropriate but not excessive doses.

Agree completely.

[Federica]

Eugene,

I’m happy you are back, and I hope that your future participation will be denser than you foresee today. Browsing the forum, I’ve come across some of those old debates. For me they have been, and still are, an invaluable resource to approach the key topics, explore them in depth from all angles, in search of the interrelations that allow the forming of an integrated view. Hoping everyone is ok with the wild quoting here below - the exact context of the discussions is less important. It's just to show that, for better or worse, you have remained present in the forum’s thoughts during this break. Clearly, you have been missed!

Thank you, Federica . Well, what can I say? It may sound banal but I’ll still say it I guess my reluctance to participate comes from the realization that the usefulness of purely philosophical discourse is rather limited (but this is not to say that it is altogether useless). The key is the spiritual practice, persistent and meticulous work on the inner transformation of one’s internal state of consciousness and, by doing that, penetrating through the egoic bubble and opening one’s mind to a larger scales and depths of the reality. But once that is in place, philosophy can definitely help to analyze and clear some misunderstandings that we inherit from our previous developmental stages, and point to new territories on the map, but then one has to actually undertake the travel using the map. So, philosophy is like a medicine that should be taken in appropriate but not excessive doses.

Agree completely.

I also agree, and also need to spend time outside the forum. Only - and it might be different for me - I don't feel I 'do philosophy' when I am here. When I log in I don't see myself entering a room with a "philosophical speculations" sign on the door. And it's not a matter of philosophical background and method, which I evidently don't have. It's a question of how much of myself I am ready to engage, and in which disposition.

[AshvinP]

Thank you, Federica . Well, what can I say? It may sound banal but I’ll still say it I guess my reluctance to participate comes from the realization that the usefulness of purely philosophical discourse is rather limited (but this is not to say that it is altogether useless). The key is the spiritual practice, persistent and meticulous work on the inner transformation of one’s internal state of consciousness and, by doing that, penetrating through the egoic bubble and opening one’s mind to a larger scales and depths of the reality. But once that is in place, philosophy can definitely help to analyze and clear some misunderstandings that we inherit from our previous developmental stages, and point to new territories on the map, but then one has to actually undertake the travel using the map. So, philosophy is like a medicine that should be taken in appropriate but not excessive doses.

Agree completely.

I also agree, and also need to spend time outside the forum. Only - and it might be different for me - I don't feel I 'do philosophy' when I am here. When I log in I don't see myself entering a room with a "philosophical speculations" sign on the door. And it's not a matter of philosophical background and method, which I evidently don't have. It's a question of how much of myself I am ready to engage, and in which disposition.

This is a great insight which itself can propel our philosophical thinking vertically. In a metaphysical materialist world, it's possible to understand something while being completely antagonistic or indifferent towards it. Since, according to that position, the inner world of attention, interest, love, etc. is completely irrelevant to the objective state of reality at any given time. But, for better or worse (perhaps some of both in the short-term), we don't live in that abstract reality. What we can understand of any particular aspect of reality, including conceptual worldviews and spiritual paths, will be entirely dependent on how much genuine interest we can muster towards understanding its inner nature, in contrast to only its superficial outer forms. Without that inner disposition and readiness to engage, we should only expect to confront a lifeless patchwork of sensory and conceptual phenomena without imaginative depth. But if we approach philosophical-spiritual discussions with that interest, and a voluntary, self-conscious aim towards understanding what our mode of philosophical thinking signifies along the vertical depth-structure, then it will naturally take on a new life and we won't feel the need to compartmentalize spiritual development and philosophical inquiry so much, as the latter becomes less about intellecutal curiosity and consumption and more about perfecting our spiritual qualities and skills for the harmonious functioning of the Whole.

I was going to start a new thread for the following passage from another esoteric writer I came across and deeply appreciate so far, but it also seems pretty suitable to share on this one, given how the discussion has gone.

Perhaps, since this rambling appears to have finally yielded a few distilled questions, an analogy might be useful in an attempt to point to even better questions. In the life of every child a profound change happens around seven years of age at the time the milk teeth are changing into the adult teeth. Prior to this change, the inner life of the child centers on play that is stimulated by fantasy. In fantasy, the inner pictures of the child arise as a result of contact between the sense organs, as part of the organism, and sense objects, which are outside the organism. A block of wood becomes a boat, a box becomes a castle, a cloud becomes an animal. The child cannot form these fantasy pictures at will. They arise as an organic response to a sense stimulus. The pictures form around the unconscious core of the personality in temperamentally driven rhythms of ebb and flow. The fantasy pictures enable the child to participate responsively in a numinous, ever-changing dialogue with the world as it is presented to the senses.

For young children, beingness pours out of the sense world in creative torrents, and their inner life and the objects of the world all participate in the magical, transformative ritual of play. Each separate thing can easily become something else in a world held in the enchanting bosom of love and oneness. The Sun-like nature of children's instinctive vision draws to them constellations of objects and people that help their organism to find the proper forces for development.

However, this stage cannot continue unchanged, and at the change of the teeth the fantasy life must undergo a transformation. The child can no longer rely on the objects of the world to stimulate inner images. Inner images must come under the control of the individual consciousness so that they can be developed and manipulated at will. The spontaneous and magical mood of oneness evaporates, and what slowly takes its place is the capacity to develop inner images independent from the sensations given by the world. The advantage of this development is that the purely personal inner images arising in fantasy can now be corrected and objectified by the child and are not dependent upon subjective feelings that arise spontaneously under the instinctual influence of sensory stimulus. In short, forming inner images separate from sense experiences is the first sign of the potential for the human being to eventually attain freedom from the iron necessity of instinct. But there is a price to pay for this freedom. Coincident with the arising of the capacity to visualize inwardly is the loss of the feeling of oneness with all of creation. This loss eventually leads, in the ninth and tenth years, to the experience of the fall from Paradise, when children often experience the rise of a skeptical and critical mood that prevents free access to the mood of play so necessary for learning.
...
But in the end science is not life, and neither a return to ancient terminology nor the technical application of rigorously organized images can prepare a person to solve the deeper questions in life. Developmentally, we could ask if, since in the child fantasy gives way to voluntary inner picturing, there is a stage of natural development that follows development of the capacity to form voluntary inner pictures. In the normal biological unfolding of an individual, the next step of adolescence brings to awareness many unresolved feelings rooted in the personality structure. Unlike the natural advance from fantasy to inner picturing that marks the school readiness of the younger child, nature has no clear cognitive gift for the adolescent as part of an automatic path of self-development. In fact, the onset of raging hormones often obscures any true cognition about the self from taking place. So simply paying greater attention to the biological patterns connected to the sense life becomes an appropriate developmental task for adolescence. Beginning in adolescence, any step taken toward inner development must be taken voluntarily, and usually at great expense to the natural appetites.

Ideally the next step in inner development for all stages after adolescence is never simply a return to a mystical worldview nor simply a diversion from the boredom brought on in reaction to overly complex abstract thought patterns. Esoterically, even mythologically, the next step always involves purification. The purging is brought about through giving away the treasures gained in the labors of the previous steps.

To summarize, in the young child the freeing of the life forces at the changing of the milk teeth provides for a more individualized use of the organism than the earlier conception-to-seven-year period can allow. After the change of teeth, the early intense focus of the life forces into biological necessity can be transcended, transforming biological life into thought life. When independence in the inner picturing process is finally attained at the ninth-year change, the feeling forces are the next to be liberated in adolescence. After that the thinking is never again directly addressed biologically as it is, for instance, in the myelinization of the neurons in the preschooler.

Comparing this to the dialogue in science, we could say that once mysticism has been transcended into analytical science, the search for a feeling metaphor to express what is experienced numinously in the physics laboratory has nowhere to go. The apparent result in a longing to go back to the precognitive fantasy language of mysticism full of portentous feelings of the sublime. By definition, feelings are not allowed in modern science. It is no wonder then that quantum physicists use Eastern mystical analogies, since these images are so connected to magical feelings.

Since the analytical capacities given to children by freeing the life forces for the processes of inner picturing seem to dim, if not actually dampen, the
capacity for mystical transcendent experience, what is the purpose in the grand scheme of things for freedom in the inner picturing process? Why is it that the life forces in particular are transformed in the preschooler into the seeds of analytical thinking? What is it about the life forces that specifically support the independent inner picturing process? And finally... is there a metamorphosis independent of the biology of the inner picturing capacity that can be developed beyond analytical thinking? And if there is, could it satisfy the feeling language requirements of mystical scientists and still be as rigorous as the analytical language of the technical sciences? All of these questions point to the development of what is known to esotericism as imaginal consciousness or Imagination with a capital “I.”

The development of Imagination is not a biological given. That is, it is not simply part of a maturation process in the organism. Once the life forces are
freed from the intense biological necessity of forming the physical organs, the greater part of the life forces in the organism can be devoted to the “free” part of the soul, the inner life. The soul uses the biological organ-forming forces to complete the biological task and then applies these organizing forces to create soul organs in the cognitive field of the individual. In the ancient schools these soul organs were called chakras... When the emotional forces are liberated from the sexual organs in adolescence, the individual is given the capacity to create life, but no accompanying cognitive development parallels the freeing of the emotional forces. The surging hormonal reasoning so prevalent in adolescence attests to this curious development. Why do we not by nature have wisdom along with the passion?

The sad fact is that we do not, and therein hangs many a tale. Esoterically, the free life forces in the budding intellect of the school-age child are seen as a seed in the thinking for developing imaginative cognition in the adult. The free feeling forces arising in adolescence must be purified in the young adult through willfully employing the newly arisen seedlike thinking capacities that are liberated in the school-age child. This task is further developed in the maturing post-adolescent young adult through planting the seed of thinking developed at the change of teeth into the soil of life. The cultivating of this seed can be accomplished a bit later by a mature adult through rigorous inner application of the capacity to form objective, logical inner pictures independent of sense impressions. The mature adult must then use this capacity to look consciously at the way the soul reacts to sense impressions.

Finally, adepts who enter imaginative consciousness go consciously into their sense life in an attempt to see the sense world once again as a little child. This path leads back into the magical forces behind the sense world the individual leaves at the change of teeth. It is the path of development walked in the pursuit of imaginative consciousness.

-Dennis Klocek, The Seer's Handbook: A Guide to Inner Perception

[Federica]

This is a great insight which itself can propel our philosophical thinking vertically. In a metaphysical materialist world, it's possible to understand something while being completely antagonistic or indifferent towards it. Since, according to that position, the inner world of attention, interest, love, etc. is completely irrelevant to the objective state of reality at any given time. But, for better or worse (perhaps some of both in the short-term), we don't live in that abstract reality. What we can understand of any particular aspect of reality, including conceptual worldviews and spiritual paths, will be entirely dependent on how much genuine interest we can muster towards understanding its inner nature, in contrast to only its superficial outer forms. Without that inner disposition and readiness to engage, we should only expect to confront a lifeless patchwork of sensory and conceptual phenomena without imaginative depth. But if we approach philosophical-spiritual discussions with that interest, and a voluntary, self-conscious aim towards understanding what our mode of philosophical thinking signifies along the vertical depth-structure, then it will naturally take on a new life and we won't feel the need to compartmentalize spiritual development and philosophical inquiry so much, as the latter becomes less about intellecutal curiosity and consumption and more about perfecting our spiritual qualities and skills for the harmonious functioning of the Whole.

I was going to start a new thread for the following passage from another esoteric writer I came across and deeply appreciate so far, but it also seems pretty suitable to share on this one, given how the discussion has gone.

Perhaps, since this rambling appears to have finally yielded a few distilled questions, an analogy might be useful in an attempt to point to even better questions. In the life of every child a profound change happens around seven years of age at the time the milk teeth are changing into the adult teeth. Prior to this change, the inner life of the child centers on play that is stimulated by fantasy. In fantasy, the inner pictures of the child arise as a result of contact between the sense organs, as part of the organism, and sense objects, which are outside the organism. A block of wood becomes a boat, a box becomes a castle, a cloud becomes an animal. The child cannot form these fantasy pictures at will. They arise as an organic response to a sense stimulus. The pictures form around the unconscious core of the personality in temperamentally driven rhythms of ebb and flow. The fantasy pictures enable the child to participate responsively in a numinous, ever-changing dialogue with the world as it is presented to the senses.

For young children, beingness pours out of the sense world in creative torrents, and their inner life and the objects of the world all participate in the magical, transformative ritual of play. Each separate thing can easily become something else in a world held in the enchanting bosom of love and oneness. The Sun-like nature of children's instinctive vision draws to them constellations of objects and people that help their organism to find the proper forces for development.

However, this stage cannot continue unchanged, and at the change of the teeth the fantasy life must undergo a transformation. The child can no longer rely on the objects of the world to stimulate inner images. Inner images must come under the control of the individual consciousness so that they can be developed and manipulated at will. The spontaneous and magical mood of oneness evaporates, and what slowly takes its place is the capacity to develop inner images independent from the sensations given by the world. The advantage of this development is that the purely personal inner images arising in fantasy can now be corrected and objectified by the child and are not dependent upon subjective feelings that arise spontaneously under the instinctual influence of sensory stimulus. In short, forming inner images separate from sense experiences is the first sign of the potential for the human being to eventually attain freedom from the iron necessity of instinct. But there is a price to pay for this freedom. Coincident with the arising of the capacity to visualize inwardly is the loss of the feeling of oneness with all of creation. This loss eventually leads, in the ninth and tenth years, to the experience of the fall from Paradise, when children often experience the rise of a skeptical and critical mood that prevents free access to the mood of play so necessary for learning.
...
But in the end science is not life, and neither a return to ancient terminology nor the technical application of rigorously organized images can prepare a person to solve the deeper questions in life. Developmentally, we could ask if, since in the child fantasy gives way to voluntary inner picturing, there is a stage of natural development that follows development of the capacity to form voluntary inner pictures. In the normal biological unfolding of an individual, the next step of adolescence brings to awareness many unresolved feelings rooted in the personality structure. Unlike the natural advance from fantasy to inner picturing that marks the school readiness of the younger child, nature has no clear cognitive gift for the adolescent as part of an automatic path of self-development. In fact, the onset of raging hormones often obscures any true cognition about the self from taking place. So simply paying greater attention to the biological patterns connected to the sense life becomes an appropriate developmental task for adolescence. Beginning in adolescence, any step taken toward inner development must be taken voluntarily, and usually at great expense to the natural appetites.

Ideally the next step in inner development for all stages after adolescence is never simply a return to a mystical worldview nor simply a diversion from the boredom brought on in reaction to overly complex abstract thought patterns. Esoterically, even mythologically, the next step always involves purification. The purging is brought about through giving away the treasures gained in the labors of the previous steps.

To summarize, in the young child the freeing of the life forces at the changing of the milk teeth provides for a more individualized use of the organism than the earlier conception-to-seven-year period can allow. After the change of teeth, the early intense focus of the life forces into biological necessity can be transcended, transforming biological life into thought life. When independence in the inner picturing process is finally attained at the ninth-year change, the feeling forces are the next to be liberated in adolescence. After that the thinking is never again directly addressed biologically as it is, for instance, in the myelinization of the neurons in the preschooler.

Comparing this to the dialogue in science, we could say that once mysticism has been transcended into analytical science, the search for a feeling metaphor to express what is experienced numinously in the physics laboratory has nowhere to go. The apparent result in a longing to go back to the precognitive fantasy language of mysticism full of portentous feelings of the sublime. By definition, feelings are not allowed in modern science. It is no wonder then that quantum physicists use Eastern mystical analogies, since these images are so connected to magical feelings.

Since the analytical capacities given to children by freeing the life forces for the processes of inner picturing seem to dim, if not actually dampen, the
capacity for mystical transcendent experience, what is the purpose in the grand scheme of things for freedom in the inner picturing process? Why is it that the life forces in particular are transformed in the preschooler into the seeds of analytical thinking? What is it about the life forces that specifically support the independent inner picturing process? And finally... is there a metamorphosis independent of the biology of the inner picturing capacity that can be developed beyond analytical thinking? And if there is, could it satisfy the feeling language requirements of mystical scientists and still be as rigorous as the analytical language of the technical sciences? All of these questions point to the development of what is known to esotericism as imaginal consciousness or Imagination with a capital “I.”

The development of Imagination is not a biological given. That is, it is not simply part of a maturation process in the organism. Once the life forces are
freed from the intense biological necessity of forming the physical organs, the greater part of the life forces in the organism can be devoted to the “free” part of the soul, the inner life. The soul uses the biological organ-forming forces to complete the biological task and then applies these organizing forces to create soul organs in the cognitive field of the individual. In the ancient schools these soul organs were called chakras... When the emotional forces are liberated from the sexual organs in adolescence, the individual is given the capacity to create life, but no accompanying cognitive development parallels the freeing of the emotional forces. The surging hormonal reasoning so prevalent in adolescence attests to this curious development. Why do we not by nature have wisdom along with the passion?

The sad fact is that we do not, and therein hangs many a tale. Esoterically, the free life forces in the budding intellect of the school-age child are seen as a seed in the thinking for developing imaginative cognition in the adult. The free feeling forces arising in adolescence must be purified in the young adult through willfully employing the newly arisen seedlike thinking capacities that are liberated in the school-age child. This task is further developed in the maturing post-adolescent young adult through planting the seed of thinking developed at the change of teeth into the soil of life. The cultivating of this seed can be accomplished a bit later by a mature adult through rigorous inner application of the capacity to form objective, logical inner pictures independent of sense impressions. The mature adult must then use this capacity to look consciously at the way the soul reacts to sense impressions.

Finally, adepts who enter imaginative consciousness go consciously into their sense life in an attempt to see the sense world once again as a little child. This path leads back into the magical forces behind the sense world the individual leaves at the change of teeth. It is the path of development walked in the pursuit of imaginative consciousness.

-Dennis Klocek, The Seer's Handbook: A Guide to Inner Perception

That was a fitting description: I have no interest in compartmentalizing more than by necessity the various moments of my day. There’s a continuous red thread. It takes different forms and intensities, sometimes it’s very much in the background, but it’s constantly present. The price I pay for this readiness to engage is that certain realizations can make me miserable, in rather unexpected ways. It would be interesting, Eugene, to hear something about your take or approach to Steiner's path that you said have started exploring? From which side have you approached it?


In the quote, Ashvin, I see the parallel with human evolution, as you have described earlier in this thread:

We needed to get outside Time to win our inner freedom, as it is not possible to exert our individual will - to potentially make errors, lie, do evil, etc. - when our thought is within the true metamorphic force of Time. The sheer reality of that force makes impossible any will-independence. That is only possible within a quantitative realm of experience, i.e. Space as the polar opposite of Time. Yet our will-thought within Space is only the seed of freedom and cannot be nourished when we idolize our own quantitative creations, thereby forgetting their final cause or telos. We forget that we can only experience 'outside Time' because the true experiencer - the higher Self - is still within the force of Time.

Referring human evolution to the process of individual growth, we could say that as humanity we have passed the child phase, and won inner freedom by taking material control over reality, externalizing it. As it seems, we are now stuck in adolescence, and not receiving “any clear cognitive gifts” with “raging hormones obscuring true cognition”.
The next step can only be “voluntary” and involve a “purification”. We could express the capacity to create a conscious spiritual life, but, as for the young adult developing rational thinking, the wisdom to live through that process has to be a voluntary act of creation, where we purify the instincts through sound and pure thinking, that has lost its magical/childlike character.

[AshvinP]

That was a fitting description: I have no interest in compartmentalizing more than by necessity the various moments of my day. There’s a continuous red thread. It takes different forms and intensities, sometimes it’s very much in the background, but it’s constantly present. The price I pay for this readiness to engage is that certain realizations can make me miserable, in rather unexpected ways. It would be interesting, Eugene, to hear something about your take or approach to Steiner's path that you said have started exploring? From which side have you approached it?


In the quote, Ashvin, I see the parallel with human evolution, as you have described earlier in this thread:

We needed to get outside Time to win our inner freedom, as it is not possible to exert our individual will - to potentially make errors, lie, do evil, etc. - when our thought is within the true metamorphic force of Time. The sheer reality of that force makes impossible any will-independence. That is only possible within a quantitative realm of experience, i.e. Space as the polar opposite of Time. Yet our will-thought within Space is only the seed of freedom and cannot be nourished when we idolize our own quantitative creations, thereby forgetting their final cause or telos. We forget that we can only experience 'outside Time' because the true experiencer - the higher Self - is still within the force of Time.

Referring human evolution to the process of individual growth, we could say that as humanity we have passed the child phase, and won inner freedom by taking material control over reality, externalizing it. As it seems, we are now stuck in adolescence, and not receiving “any clear cognitive gifts” with “raging hormones obscuring true cognition”.
The next step can only be “voluntary” and involve a “purification”. We could express the capacity to create a conscious spiritual life, but, as for the young adult developing rational thinking, the wisdom to live through that process has to be a voluntary act of creation, where we purify the instincts through sound and pure thinking, that has lost its magical/childlike character.

Good observation and well said. I have always found it powerful and rewarding to make the micro-macro analogies for the spiritual evolution of consciousness. Speaking of which, here is an interesting imaginative exercise people may want to work with.

It should be added that the sense experiences themselves are completely lawful. Light and dark, color, and the laws of optics and sound are not part of the pathology of the soul. They are still in the hands of the hierarchies. The sensations themselves are part of the world, and the forces that animate the senses are lawful and coherent. They are from the work of the God of Solomon. When, in sense experience, human beings induce the forces animating the senses and make them personal to their own biographical needs, the forces lose their purity and become compromised.
...
Gratitude for sensation is a gift from the hierarchies to the striving human being, but, like grace, it is only given in relation to the effort made by erring humans to undertake self-transformation. Gratitude for sensation is most effectively developed by paying attention to small things in life in a concentrated and devoted way. For instance, paying attention to the biography of a flower is a way of disenchanting our sleeping relationship to the flower. We sleep into the flower when we have no interest in it. Inwardly imagining the plant growing and then producing a flower goes a step deeper in the possibility of awakening into the flower. Inwardly forming the flowering process of a plant in a meditatively rhythmic way goes a step further. When our relationship to the flower is disenchanted, the elementals can go back into the world ether, and our consciousness can follow them there without experiencing fright at dissolving the physical body. We can steady our attention through inwardly picturing the flower's processes of incarnation. The inner picture we form in the meditation connects us to the elemental beings and hierarchical beings that stand behind the patterns of the flower's becoming. Our attention is gradually made resonant to the lawful patterns in the manifestation of the flower out of the archetypal realm into the sense world. Since we are consciously and devotedly practicing visualizing the flower, our own consciousness forms an analog to the flower that provides insight into our own biographical pattern of becoming. The insights gathered in such a practice then fructify the imaginative forces in the eye of the soul, and we begin to understand the patterns of destiny in the forces of our own life. Feelings of devotion accompany such insights as our own life forces participate consciously in the transformation of the senses from being simply reactive to being the doors to perception of creative patterns in the cosmos.

Through this practice we begin to experience the sense world as a world in which images are given to us as teachings about our own incarnation process. We find analogs for our own patterns of destiny in the life found in the world and develop a deep devotion to the small things of the sense world as a laboratory for the production of analogs.

[Cleric K]

...

Thanks, Ashvin, for bringing up Klocek! I have read this particular book probably ten years ago but now I realize how little I have actually grasped at that time. Seems it's time to revisit it.