Islam and anthroposophy

[Güney27]

Cleric,
Thank you for taking the time to continue helping us on our way.
Again, I read your answer several times to be able to grasp what you said.
So through prayer we imitate the divine rather than secular things that come to us through the sensual world?
The prayers were given to us by great people like Zarahtrusta or Jesus(who is more like a god incarnated than a seer?), who come from the spiritual world and help us on our way to development?

There are different levels of prayer. For example, if someone is prescribed physiotherapy, they repeat the exercises that the instructor gives them, even if they understand nothing of anatomy and the idea behind their design. Yet they still benefit. In a similar way, a pious person, even though repeating the words without deeper understanding, still benefits because the words set in motion certain currents of the soul. Then there's a higher level of prayer where the person tries to experience the words pictorially and with great intensity. You can try this with Lord's prayer, for example. You can take it verse by verse and stop for a while at each one. Don't jump into philosophizing too much. Just try to imagine pictorially, as if you have to draw a painting for each verse. The goal is not so much to have vivid colors of the picture but simply to think about its contents. This exercise engages the imagination quite a lot. It's easy to imagine landscapes and objects but how would you paint a picture of Goodness or Gratitude, or Blessing? Or you can try to express that in a whole body movement, dance the picture. Through what gestures would you express these soul realities? In the spirit of the conversations in the other thread, such exercises help us distinguish the picture - the physiognomy - from the soul forces. It also develops the forces through which you will later express higher intuition into pictures and metaphors.

Even though we're not fully conscious of the way these exercises work on our soul, they already have organizing powers. Our ordinary self lives in intuition of color, sound, taste, smell, pain, pleasure and all that intellectual thoughts we have about their metamorphoses. This is the language of our intellect. Our soul lives in higher order language. Things like Kingdom, Earth, Heaven and so on, are very concrete strata of experience, just like while in the body, the sensations in our feet and the thoughts in our head are concrete experiences. There are so many aspects to prayer.

Why is it that nowadays many people see prayer as a concentration exercise (i.e. as a mantra)?

Because of the implicit intellectual pride of our age. Today people say "Of course, we today don't believe in divinities, we know it is all energy in various forms. The ancients worshipped these energies. Today, as a kind of tribute to that ancient heritage, we also say these old prayers but of course, we take them to a new level and see them only as a tool to quiet down the mind."

,,When we pray our words shouldn't remain under our nose. They must be felt to fly away like doves set free. As long as we fear to let the dove free, we're secretly keeping a boundary around our consciousness. We practically say "there's no need to let that dove go because there's nothing there. It will be a waste." But the more we let them go, the further they fly and the more our soul expands. Then we find our soul to be one and the same with Cosmic space"

During a prayer, would it help if I could visually imagine how my words would "fly away"?

Yes. Of course, not simply in a mechanical sense. It's very beneficial to imagine the words as seeds that quietly sink in the depths of your soul. There, beneath the threshold of consciousness, these seeds are nourished by Divine Warmth, Light and Love from one side, and by your devotion from the other. Slowly but surely, these seeds grow and become fully conscious soul faculties, through which you live in the higher order strata of reality.

"Through Christianity, the emotional life of people was led up to Kama-Manas. Through Mohammedanism, the mind, the spirit, was led down from spiritual life to the abstract understanding of purely physical laws." (GA 92)


Would Islamic prayers then cause the opposite of Christian prayers?
As I have understood from reading Steiner up to the present point, Christianity is a bit opposite to Islam,
because it contains Luciferic (Mohammed's idea of ​​paradise) and Ahrimanic elements.
Ahriman-Christus-Luzifer

As explained above, today we should be already at a level where we understand the meaning of our prayers. We should be able to live through them pictorially. It's not a question to simply oppose Islam and Christianity. You need to gradually form an Ideal about the direction you would like to see human evolution going. If one prays that their life goes relatively smoothly, being relatively good, so that they can take their place in Paradise after death, it's all the same if they call themselves a Muslim or a Christian. If you pray that your thoughts, feelings and actions may become conductors of the Divine Life here on Earth, then you'll also have the means to distinguish which teachings and methods lead in that direction. But it all depends on what your high ideal is.

cleric,
Thank you for your helpful comments.
Your physiotherapy metaphor makes a lot of sense

,,Yes. Of course, not simply in a mechanical sense. It's very beneficial to imagine the words as seeds that quietly sink in the depths of your soul. There, beneath the threshold of consciousness, these seeds are nourished by Divine Warmth, Light and Love from one side, and by your devotion from the other."

I have a problem at the same time as I say a prayer, to visualize the content, it is hardly possible for me instantly.
For your given example, I can imagine seeds, but I have no perception of the term soul, so I can't imagine anything more than a mystically shiny floating color.
I don't know how to construct such an idea. Isn't it impossible to imagine non-sensual things?


"It's not a question to simply oppose Islam and Christianity. You need to gradually form an ideal about the direction you would like to see human evolution going. If one prays that their life goes relatively smoothly, being relatively good, so that they can take their place in Paradise after death, it's all the same if they call themselves a Muslim or a Christian. If you pray that your thoughts, feelings and actions may become conductors of the Divine Life here on Earth, then you'll also have the means to distinguish which teachings and methods lead in that direction."


My ideal is to gain awareness of my own being.
But like you said, it's better to drink straight from the source.
So when I pray, I want to learn from the right sources.
But isn't it the beautiful, easy life, paradise, for which followers of exoteric religions pray?
And if Islam contains elements of forces that want to disrupt the course of human evolution, wouldn't it be developmentally dangerous to say these prayers and plant them in our souls?
Kind regards

[Cleric K]

,,Yes. Of course, not simply in a mechanical sense. It's very beneficial to imagine the words as seeds that quietly sink in the depths of your soul. There, beneath the threshold of consciousness, these seeds are nourished by Divine Warmth, Light and Love from one side, and by your devotion from the other."

I have a problem at the same time as I say a prayer, to visualize the content, it is hardly possible for me instantly.
For your given example, I can imagine seeds, but I have no perception of the term soul, so I can't imagine anything more than a mystically shiny floating color.
I don't know how to construct such an idea. Isn't it impossible to imagine non-sensual things?

That's right, and this is precisely the importance of prayer - to learn to address non-sensual things in our thinking. This comes only gradually. Normally we're always used to have a sensory-like support for our thoughts. Even our thinking finds its support the sensory-like sound of our inner voice.

But we live in the non-sensual all the time. When you try to tell a story from your life, do you see from where you draw the memory images? How do you know where to find the memories? How do you know how not to pull out the wrong story? So even though you don't see anything, you have certain intuitive orientation within your being. The soul can't be seen as something existing in front of you. Yet all your inner life flows through its curvature. Thus, if you want an image for your soul, think of infinite inner space. Colors, thoughts, feelings are the perceptions that flow within this space. So when you imagine the shiny color it's not a matter of fantasizing that the color is the soul. But you can spread that color in the whole of your inner space and say "I'm fully aware that this color is there entirely because of my activity, yet the inner space within which I imagine that color is beyond my making. It's much rather that by imagining the color, I'm trying to feel the geometry of this soul space. The activity through which I fill my inner space with color is similar to a spreading my thinking feelers, as if I want to understand what are the constraints of this soul space, just as I can feel the geometry of an object with my sense of touch." Of course, here we shouldn't be thinking of spatial geometry. Our soul space is something living. For example, one day you're in a bad mood. You don't feel like meditating or praying. You're within a specific configuration of your soul space. If you try to extends your thinking feelers, they seem to be paralyzed by your emotions. Thus in a strange way you're constrained in the ways your imagination can flow. To understand our soul space it is not a matter of some intellectual geometric understanding but intuitive orientation within our inner life of ideas and feelings.

My ideal is to gain awareness of my own being.
But like you said, it's better to drink straight from the source.
So when I pray, I want to learn from the right sources.
But isn't it the beautiful, easy life, paradise, for which followers of exoteric religions pray?
And if Islam contains elements of forces that want to disrupt the course of human evolution, wouldn't it be developmentally dangerous to say these prayers and plant them in our souls?
Kind regards

For someone on a moral level where he's committing crimes, it would be better to do exoteric prayers than nothing at all. In this way it can prevent greater danger. But for those who are ready to approach the true spiritual life, as it is possible for man of our age, prayers have to be directed accordingly. Otherwise we're simply going back in our evolution.