Stranger wrote: ↑Tue Nov 08, 2022 5:34 pm
“A time certainly is approaching when people will start to yearn for insight into the full nature of reality. Today there is a fierce opposition to a holistic view of things, not only in theoretical things, but also in ordinary life.”
Rudolf Steiner "Universal Spirituality and Human Physicality”
The "holistic view of things" is that there is only one "full nature of reality" that manifests the world of a vast variety of ideas and forms through a variety of aspects and faculties (Thinking, Willing, Feeling, Perceiving, Imagining etc) enacted through spiritual activity of a vast variety of spiritual beings in the universe, yet all of those beings, aspects, ideas and forms are never apart from the "full nature of reality" and essentially never anything else than the "full nature of reality". When we only pay attention to the variety and neglect the unity, we perceive ourselves as a separate self interacting with the world outside our self, we perceive the world as a variety of objects and beings separate from ourselves, and this is the foundation of our dualistic perception of the world catalyzing the development of the ego and a sense of separation and alienation. The only way to overcome such alienation is to raise ourselves to the holistic view and realize the underlying unity of the "full nature of reality" without negating or neglecting the variety. All spiritual traditions of the past, both Western and Eastern, pointed to the attainment of such holistic view, not just as an intellectual understanding, but as an actual spiritual experience and actual state of consciousness. Attaining such holistic state also constitutes a core component of Steiner's SS.
“Lastly, at the fourth stage of knowledge Inspiration also ceases. Of the elements customarily observed in everyday knowledge, the ego alone remains to be considered. The attainment of this stage by the occult student is marked by a definite inner experience. This experience manifests itself in the feeling that he no longer stands outside the things and occurrences that he recognizes, but is himself within them. Images are not the object, but merely its imprint. Also, inspiration does not yield up the object itself, but only tells about it. But what now lives in the soul is in reality the object itself. The ego has streamed forth over all beings; it has merged with them. The actual living of things within the soul is Intuition. When it is said of Intuition that “through it man creeps into all things,” this is literally true. — In ordinary life man has only one “intuition” — namely, of the ego itself, for the ego can in no way be perceived from without; it can only be experienced in the inner life. A simple consideration will make this fact clear. It is a consideration that has not been applied by psychologists with sufficient exactitude. Unimpressive as it may appear to one with full understanding, it is of the most far-reaching significance. It is as follows. A thing in the outer world can be called by all men by the self-same name. A table can be spoken of by all as a “table”; a tulip by all as a “tulip.” Mr. Miller can be addressed by all as “Mr. Miller.” But there is one word that each can apply only to himself. This is the word “I.” No other person can call me “I.” To anyone else I am a “you.” In the same way everyone else is a “you” to me. Only I can say “I” to myself. This is because each man lives, not outside, but within the “I.” In the same way, in intuitive cognition, one lives in all things. The perception of the ego is the prototype of all intuitive cognition. Thus to enter into all things, one must first step outside oneself. One must become “selfless” in order to become blended with the “self,” the “ego” of another being.”
Rudolph Steiner. The Stages of Higher Knowledge
We should also be clear that the path to living Unity is through more consciousness of diversity, except
inward rather than only outward diversity. Modern man confronts an amazing complex of outward phenomena, but feels his inner life to be more or less dim, homegenous, and uniform. He may come up with abstract categories to label aspects of his inner life, but he doesn't really sense the subtle differentiations inwardly. His willing, feeling, thinking activity is all stirred together into a stew which seems to function harmoniously, only because he is not conscious of all the inner gradations of activity and conflicting currents. The task now is to use the impulse of self-conscious thinking to inwardly differentiate these various currents and begin to work on them, to purify and harmonize them. Until we learn to differentiate various currents of his soul life, we cannot come back to a living Unity of body-soul-spirit. That is why the task is rightly called a spiritual science - without a living, first-person knowledge of the differentiated inner phenomena, the forces, substances, structures of one's evolving organism, there is nothing to unify.
First the human individual and humanity as a whole needs to confront the fact that it knows almost none of the relevant phenomena which need to be studied, i.e. that it is just as the very
beginning of developing a holistic science. Even with respect to outer phenomena, we only dream of knowing the relevant details, but most of them go completely unnoticed for reasons related to our own myopic soul-tendencies. The world of diversity itself serves a critical purpose if we were only to pay more attention to it, and developing the capacity to pay more attention is itself the critical purpose. Without our lives on the physical plane of diverse phenomena, where we feel ourselves to be separate and isolated "I"-beings, there could not be the development of human Love which is carried back through the higher worlds and results in Freedom. This will be a very gradual process - there are many layers of fractal conditioning, chaotic non-linear inner dynamics relating to our individual, familial, racial, national, cultural, human Karma, which need to be transfigured into more harmonious rhythms through the power of self-consciousness which ascends perpendicular to the normal conceptual plane.
In that sense, Intuitive cognition is an ideal to reach but a far distant one for most people. There are many inner spiritual processes which first need to be unearthed within the realm of our
current thinking consciousness and the next realm of Imaginative consciousness. Cleric has written before about the 'One law' of continuity of consciousness, which is very powerful to contemplate. If many people were to suddenly awaken into states of Intuitive cognition through minimal effort in a single lifetime, i.e. without rhythmically ascending the gradient, there would be chaos in their continuity of consciousness. Or, rather, there would be no continuity, since none of their 'previous' states of Be-ing could resonate with the state they awakened into. They would feel as a completely new Godlike being. This can't happen. So those who prematurely strive for Intuitive cognition won't attain it, but could end up retrogressing into far
less evolved modes of consciousness. These possibilities should be taken very seriously (and Steiner cautions about it throughout his work).