Spiritual "science"

[Federica]

Anthony,
As the originator of the question, it would be interesting to know how you see spiritual science at this point of the debate? Are you still searching for evidence? What to think of Steiner's "fantastical claims of knowledge"?

[lorenzop]

..... I said that the ancient Moon evolution — which projects itself in present cometary existence, because the comet has remained at this stage and, as far as present conditions allow, expresses those old relationships in its laws — I said that this ancient Moon evolution differs from that of the earth in that nitrogen and certain nitrogenous compounds — cyanide, prussic acid compounds — were as necessary to the beings on the ancient Moon as oxygen is necessary to the beings of our present earth. Cyanide and similar substances are compounds that are deadly to the life of higher beings, leading to their destruction. Yet compounds of carbon and nitrogen, compounds of prussic acid and the like, played an entirely similar role to that of oxygen on the earth.

Yes this reads like a scientific finding, assuming he detailed his methodology and how it can be repeated.
Curious about his refering to ' the beings on the ancient Moon', wondering if there was a concesus at his time there was once life on the moon. Or, if this is his claim, this would be a solid opportunity to locate data\evidence and vindicate Steiner once and for all

[Anthony66]

Cleric,

I'm really struggling to understand this paragraph:

But what if we haven't yet reached the tipping point, where we begin to sense the holistic intuition of the other pole? Then we see reality in the other way - not half empty but half full. Then our present human condition is seen as truly emerging from the darkness of unconsciousness but this darkness is rather grasped as hollowed out consciousness. Thus suddenly our growth in intuitive orientation within reality turns out to be evolutionary restoration to full Cosmic consciousness.

What are the two poles here? I'm not getting at all what "hollowed out consciousness" means. The sense of the paragraph is bad stuff, bad stuff, bad stuff,...., then suddenly full Cosmic consciousness.

Anthony, one of the poles, I believe you grasp fairly well since it is the default for our culture. It is the picture of consciousness emerging from the darkness of unconsciousness. This is how both Schop and materialism see it. Dim instinctive life becomes dream-like and gradually, sparks of cognition begin to flash here and there within which self-consciousness awakens.

The other pole is admittedly more challenging for contemporary man. We can approach understanding through analogies. Picture your current state of being. What you experience now has been gradually reached in the course of your life. Your intuitive orientation in the world has been growing and integrating. For example, if you go far back in your childhood you may be able to reach a point where you didn't yet know that there's such a thing as a wider world, other countries and nations. Imagine that you reverse the flow of time and move from your present state towards your childhood. Picture how little by little holes in your intuition begin to appear. It is as if you little by little forget your present state. And I'm not speaking only of abstract declarative memory. There are so many things that we have gained intuition about even without having concepts. For example, a toddler may learn to play with the light switch even before knowing the words. Yet this is pictorial intuition. Connection has been made between the picture of the switch and the light. So imagine that such trivial intuitions are also being hollowed out.

Now reverse time again and picture that few years from now you'll have even more intuitions. They may not be Earth-shattering revelations (although I wish you with all my heart that they are!) but in any case you'll have more encompassing intuition than your, then, present state. If nothing else, you'll have at least integrated few more years of events into your picture of world history. So it's almost as if now you're your future self but with something hollowed out, with something missing. This is simplified, of course, because our development is not only increase in everything. At every step we also sacrifice things. For example, in your future state you may have sacrificed a bad habit or trait of character. But it's still true that your future intuition will be more complete because you'll encompass also the things you had to sacrifice along the way.

An even further future state of being necessarily knows what death is. The knowledge of crossing the threshold of death is also hollowed out from the consciousness of man of our age, unless he does something about it. Death is one of the events that is connected with a sacrifice - the physical spectrum. The hollowed out intuitions of existence without physical organs are not in some parallel universe. They are separated from us only through time. But this time is flexible. If we train, we can loosen our spiritual activity from the physical organs while still on Earth (it is loosened anyway every night in sleep but without being able to sustain consciousness). Then we live in both worlds so to speak. And this is really the ground from which spiritual science speaks.

Now picture this state going as far as the Divine, who grasps the inner Cosmos as a reflection of grand symphonic intuition. Thus the human state is a hollowed out Divine state, in the process of being filled up with intuition, through the appropriate expansion of consciousness and the needed sacrifices.

Does this make it more clear what the white pole represents? And even if it is more clear, this doesn't mean that you'll find that much appealing. That's why I spoke of that inner conflict, which, if you dig deep enough, will be found to be exactly this – whether we want to feel our ego (even if considered illusionary) to be fully ours, a pile of Cosmic sparks risen from the depths of unconsciousness, or we're willing to conceive in humility that our present state is only the sparsest intuition of what a more mature state of our being will know in much more holistic way. That's also why we speak of a tipping point. And this has nothing to do with being 'converted'. Such dogmatic conversions are useless for humans in our age. Switching from one belief system to another leads nowhere. The tipping point is felt when we're willing to recognize that we don't even know ourselves - the being that pours itself into our thoughts across the threshold of death. We don't know the being that precipitates the thoughts that we simply take for granted on the screen. To grasp this in a more realistic way it is especially valuable to recognize some traits of our character which in an early age were simply the unquestionable feeling of what we are. At a more mature age these traits become more and more conscious until (hopefully) we find the spiritual degrees of freedom through which we can transform them. So what at an earlier age were like channels through which our existence flowed with iron necessity, later become something that we sacrifice and grow out of, like the butterfly sacrifices the cocoon. Then we progressively see what we have been moving through until recently.

This is the key of PoF because in our thinking we’re moving through such channels, as in a cocoon labyrinth. While we seek the laws of thinking in the way we try to understand an electric circuit, we haven’t yet passed the tipping point - we still secretly want to feel on top of things. We begin to cross that point when we recognize that we have to consciously grow into a being that sees our present intellectual life as sparse flashes of light. As we grow into that being we recognize how we have been banging into the walls of our soul labyrinths - our desires, beliefs, sympathies, antipathies, theories, ideologies. Then we find new degrees of freedom through which we begin the endless creative work of organizing our turbulent soul space into a musical flow attuned to the Cosmos at large.

Thanks Cleric, that makes sense. The only sentence I really don't have a grasp on from your two posts is, "Thus suddenly our growth in intuitive orientation within reality turns out to be evolutionary restoration to full Cosmic consciousness."

I must admit I was struggling with the concept of the "growing intuitive being" but I feel like a small light has gone off in the last hour where I feel like I have some sense of what is being spoken of. When you wrote above about regressing to childhood, I initially pictured the shedding of mental "factoids". But then I took more of a perspective of the acquisition of learning the skill of riding a bike and what it would be like to lose that skill. Viewing my life through that type of experiential lens, even with things like losing the knowledge of the existence of other countries, helps.

[Anthony66]

This is ‘special pleading’, you are asking for special consideration for ‘spiritual science’ because it sits on some higher plane. Perhaps Steiner justifies this claim philosophically/logically, but does he justify this claim scientifically?
To account for this claim scientifically he would have to account for all existing evidence (one can’t simply throw out prior data) and supply evidence he has at least found this higher plane, and he has a better explanation.
If he or anyone claims he has evidence but it is ‘special’, or only he and a few others can measure it, etc., that’s not science.
Also the meaning of evidence is not within the pervue of science.

Lorenzo,

To add an additional consideration to what Cleric wrote - "Then the same people, as soon as they are presented with uncomfortable ideas, demand scientific evidence, as if the same these people didn't a minute ago scorn the illusionary cycles of the intellect."

Why do these ideas become uncomfortable? Imagine you are listening to a talk by Donald Hoffman. He says that the modern science has only been studying the relations of icons on the perceptual interface (the dream world of Cleric's metaphor) for the last few hundred years, ignoring the underlying layers of conscious agentic activity which give rise to the interface (the world of the waking self). Now, he tells us, that he is pursuing mathematically precise dynamics by which this depth structure of conscious agentic activity 'projects into' the perceptual interface, so that these underlying dynamics will 'give him back' the theories of evolution, GR, QM as they appear within the perceptual interface. Does listening to this talk make you uncomfortable? I imagine that most people on this forum would be quite comfortable listening to Hoffman give this talk, and would probably nod their heads in agreement the whole way through.

The spiritual scientific method of Steiner (and others) purports to do the exact same thing as Hoffman, albeit to already have made quite a bit of progress in discerning the conscious agentic relations which give rise to the dream world i.e. perceptual interface, in which our current philosophizing and scientific theorizing takes place. What makes this so uncomfortable, compared to Hoffman's talk, is that it's not an abstract mathematical theory which remains far removed from our own immanent experience of the World and our own identity in that World, i.e. which takes itself less seriously than it should. It asks us to include ourselves into this whole framework of deeper conscious agentic activity, to understand ourselves as completely embedded within it in every moment of our lives. To remain consistent and remember our previous conclusions about the dreamy perceptual interface in the very act of additional theorizing. Through this remembrance, we are led to find the deeper relations of the waking self who dreams the perceptual interface within the intimate workings of our own soul.

This post and Cleric's lucid dreaming post are very helpful.

[Anthony66]

Anthony,
As the originator of the question, it would be interesting to know how you see spiritual science at this point of the debate? Are you still searching for evidence? What to think of Steiner's "fantastical claims of knowledge"?

Federica,

As someone who has been involved in the creation "science" wars, I'm very sensitive to the use of the term. Fundamentalist creationists use the science moniker to falsely bolster an otherwise impoverished methodology.

I'm also wary of using "spiritual" as an adjective in front of science. There is vanilla science with its elements of evidence, reason, testability, falsification, and repeatability. If the qualifier is used as a way of special pleading an exemption from one of the requirements of science then I'm quite uncomfortable.

I'd rather think that we have a science here with the qualifier "spiritual" referring to the domain of inquiry. As such it has a set of tools. Physics employs tools - particle accelerators, interferometers, lasers - each requiring specific training and the development of expertise to operate. So on the face of it, the development of expertise to probe the spiritual world is to be expected. But here we come to another of my points of discomfort. There have been many claims of the development or appropriation of spiritual faculties in the history of humanity. From my evangelical days, there was talk of the witness of the Holy Spirit. This faculty apparently testifies to the truth of Christianity (typically the evangelical formulation). For the outsider, there is no testing of this. One might seek this gift, and indeed some claimed to have it. But there always remained an impenetrable barrier, through which the only path was at the whims of gods. From my current perspective, there are aspects of SS that have a similar character. The day I start lecturing about what some being in Atlantis said is certainly not on any path I can conceive or have control in navigating. The gods will have to step in for that.

I ever so slowly grow in my understanding and acceptance of the arguments presented for the holistic view of reality proffered by SS. But as I recently said elsewhere, I find many of the pontifications of Steiner very strange indeed and have parked ingesting the advanced material as it is just too foreign to my current being.

[Federica]

Thanks Anthony, that's clear!
I will share what I think based on my current understanding of the whole matter.

As someone who has been involved in the creation "science" wars, I'm very sensitive to the use of the term.

Yes, I understand that. Two comments come to mind here:

1) As ScottRoberts and Wayfarer have pointed out, ‘science’ in the expression ‘spiritual science’ should be read as ‘sound knowledge based on rational, methodical inquiry’ (as opposed to divination) rather than as ‘working under the methods and protocols of present-day academic scientific research’. For anyone born and raised in a neo-latin language like me, this is easier, as the word for science is literally a subsection of the word for knowledge. In English, the words ‘science’ and ‘knowledge’ don’t exhibit any connection and it’s a bit less intuitive. So it's important to ease the rigid contours of the various concepts we use and remain flexible, even if we would so gladly rely on some solid and fixed reference points.

2) You often say “as a former evangelical Christian...”. It’s normal to refer to one’s past formative experiences, I do that too. Nonetheless, it makes me think that the goal of spiritual development is to eventually come to a point where our thinking is disentangled from all that. Thinking has to aspire to become soul-free and sense-free. We want to let go of all the ‘certified identities’ of our past that still push on our present freedom, as we are often reminded here. And sometimes we get attached to past identitites even if we have rejected them now.
Such thinking neutrality might be impossible for the time being, but for me it’s still useful to make a mental note that I am producing all my current expressions from a biased position which equanimity and sense-neutrality are imperfect, and that I want to transcend. (Incidentally, what a ‘neat’ approach to knowledge! One that ‘objective’ science doesn’t even imagine to strive for, when its practice is all but free from philosophical standpoints, as Wayfarer has confirmed above. We think of scientific research as neutral and objective, but that’s, to a major extent, social conditioning).


Coming to your two points of discomfort:

If the qualifier [spiritual] is used as a way of special pleading an exemption from one of the requirements of science then I'm quite uncomfortable.

Spirit is both the domain of inquiry and the tool. That’s why some special attention is required in approaching spiritual science. That’s also what made ScottRoberts say that all sciences/domains of knowledge involve thinking about the domain, but because spiritual science “is thinking about thinking, I think it should be considered as being on a different plane, though whether one says higher, or prior, or lower (as in foundational) is a matter of taste.” Which leaves us in a little scary position, where the ship we are using for navigation is one with the ocean we are navigating. Certainly we would be more comfortable clinging to external references and concepts, like “the requirements of science”, trying to guard against making the same ‘mistakes’ of the past. It’s difficult to trust our own abilities, so we try to carefully move along whatever seemingly solid foundation we can find - science and evidence - to guide every little step and check if it’s legit or not.


An image that has come to mind to illustrate why spiritual science is on a different plane, and why there’s no special pleading in that, is this. Imagine you are moving along the paths of a park, or playground, sitting on a self-driving little cart, like a golf cart. You are wearing a pair of fully covering sunglasses. The glasses cover all your visual field and are completely dark and opaque. You couldn’t see anything through the glasses, if it wasn’t for two small holes, one in front of each eye. The holes are so small that the only impression you get through them is small dots of color. A light green dot appears when there’s grass in front of your face, and a blue dot when your head is turned towards the lake, and so on. Let’s say the only thing you know about your current experience is this visual experience. For some reason, you have forgotten that you are moving on a cart, and you have no idea what’s out there and where you are. You only know the bright colored dots appearing through the holes of your glasses, and that the colors change continuously. But you are determined to understand your environment with scientific method. You decide to rigorously collect evidence. You want to discover more or these dots, and see if by any chance they change with some regularity and why. Is there any scientific law that can be inferred behind this perpetually changing colors? So you make an experiment. You look steadily in one direction for a given time, and observe and note the colors you see at regular intervals, maybe every second. Then you repeat in various directions. You don't realize it, but the cart is turning and turning along the paths, and colors change continuously, so no observable pattern emerges. So you say: I monitored reality in steady states, but color appearance has no regularity to it whatsoever. I have now collected sufficient evidence to conclude that one fundamental law of reality is color chaos. Across all reality, color must have this property of perpetually random variability. That’s the evidence.
But if you are lucky, here comes a spiritual scientist to you and tells you: “Anthony, this is actually not accurate. Out there, there is indeed some color consistency to what you are observing. I can tell you there’s a lake that’s always within the blue-gray tones, there’s grass that’s always light green, and even an ice-cream stand that is reliably pink. There is even a wood that lawfully appears within the dark green scale, always. You don’t have to believe me, just please follow my instructions. I’ll explain. You are actually wearing immersive glasses, let me show you how to take them off. And can you feel that you are constantly moving around on a little cart? I’ll show you that too, and how to integrate that, so you’ll see by yourself that there’s actually no color chaos. Shall we do it?”
To which we might be tempted to answer: “Wait, do you have evidence for your fantastical claims? How do you know that color is not random? Please provide some scientific evidence. Please observe and notice color patterns for yourself objectively, here's the protocol and best practices for color observation experiments. We are not scientists, but this is certainly a great protocol. Otherwise someone would have told us. Do that, then make a report. We can arrange peer reviewing of your report when you’re done. And we are open minded, maybe you are right, and maybe we haven’t observed long enough, or carefully enough, or often enough. So we are interested, but please justify your claims scientifically. No spiritual special pleading will be tolerated.”


So... As in this illustration, spiritual science does account for all existing evidence, but one can only realize that for oneself after following the instructions on how to ditch the glasses and how to become aware of the cart. However, the way to do it is obviously not to collect more color evidence through the little holes! It would not make any sense.
As Steiner says in Knowledge of the Higher worlds, speaking of some results of initiation:

These, then, are the gifts which the student owes to his development at this stage: insight into his higher self; insight into the doctrine of the incarnation of this higher being in a lower; insight into the laws by which life in the physical world is regulated according to its spiritual connections, that is, the law of karma; and finally, insight into the existence of the great initiates.
Thus it is said of a student who has reached this stage, that all doubt has vanished from him. His former faith, based on reason and sound thoughts, is now replaced by knowledge and insight which nothing can undermine.

When we are still wearing the glasses, some level of reasoned faith is necessary indeed. This is not blind belief, but a positive disposition, based on reason and sound thoughts, based on the progressive insights and results we get along the way too. In this sense the science of spirit/thinking is scientific: it’s not dreamt, or conjured up, but fact-based. However the first person direct, full understanding of those facts, only will come after we have taken off the sunglasses. Only then will we see the big picture - in the metaphor, the playground and the real nature of the color dots. But this is not an instant happening like taking off a pair of sunglasses is. It requires effort and application. In this sense only, a faithful, reasoned (scientific/study-based) positive disposition and willingness to put in the effort is required. I hope this also addresses the second point of discomfort, about the gifts of spiritual development being hidden behind an impenetrable wall.

[AshvinP]

..... I said that the ancient Moon evolution — which projects itself in present cometary existence, because the comet has remained at this stage and, as far as present conditions allow, expresses those old relationships in its laws — I said that this ancient Moon evolution differs from that of the earth in that nitrogen and certain nitrogenous compounds — cyanide, prussic acid compounds — were as necessary to the beings on the ancient Moon as oxygen is necessary to the beings of our present earth. Cyanide and similar substances are compounds that are deadly to the life of higher beings, leading to their destruction. Yet compounds of carbon and nitrogen, compounds of prussic acid and the like, played an entirely similar role to that of oxygen on the earth.

Yes this reads like a scientific finding, assuming he detailed his methodology and how it can be repeated.
Curious about his refering to ' the beings on the ancient Moon', wondering if there was a concesus at his time there was once life on the moon. Or, if this is his claim, this would be a solid opportunity to locate data\evidence and vindicate Steiner once and for all

Indeed, the methodology is detailed in books such as How to Know Higher Worlds, along with many lectures, and I keep coming across more and more writers who repeated the methodology. And those are only the people who decided to start writing books about their spiritual scientific research.

The point here is not really to get into what all these things mean - that requires a lot of study. If we pick up a book on organic chemistry without any background in the subject, we probably wouldn't expect all the research to suddenly become transparent to our understanding without intensive study. Suffice to say, 'ancient moon' isn't the physical moon we perceive now, but a previous incarnation of the Earth organism, just like we have previous incarnations.

Perhaps more accessible examples are those related to the current human organism. If, in addition to the physical body, there is a life body, desire body, and ego-complex which regulate and influence the various systems/processes of the human organism, just as substantially and precisely as the physical body, then is there any possibility that this would not be relevant to scientific inquiry and understanding in the domains of chemistry, biology, physiology, etc.? Assuming these subtle members of the human organism to exist for the moment, do you see how there simply cannot exist a genuine science of the human organism without factoring their roles/functions in? There can be scientific debate about their existence, but there is no logical argument to be made that their existence is not a question of immense importance for science.

We should be clear that, through all of this, we are not seeking to 'vindicate Steiner'. Steiner was not seeking to impart findings which can then be accepted as true after they are peer reviewed, by all of us non-scientists out there. The biggest difference between mainstream scientific practice and spiritual scientific practice is that the latter is also about perfecting our own being-in-the-world, regardless of who or where or what we are in life. We are, after all, an integral aspect of the World Process which science investigates. Our scientific thinking is itself an aspect of that WP, and a part of spiritual science is not only using it to accumulate spiritual factoids, but learning how to direct it for the benefit of the Whole. It is not a practice limited to the lucky few who happen to be in a position to participate in scientific and academic circles. Everyone has a stake and a share in the spiritual scientific endeavor simply by virtue of being spiritual agents at a human stage of evolution. It is only through this free and active participation that the scientific (and aesthetic/moral) secrets of the Cosmic organism are revealed to us.

[Anthony66]

But if you are really lucky, here comes a fundy Christian to you and tells you: Federica, this is actually not accurate. Out there, there is indeed some color consistency to what you are observing. I can tell you there’s a lake that’s always within the blue-gray tones, there’s grass that’s always light green, and even an ice-cream stand that is reliably pink. There is even a wood that lawfully appears within the dark green scale, always. You don’t have to believe me, just please follow the book in my hands. I’ll explain. You are actually wearing immersive glasses which conceal the lawful color patterns around you. But this book was written by the one who created the lawful color patterns and it tells us of a wonderful arrangement of colors. By learning the contents of this book you too come to know yourself that there’s actually no color chaos. Shall we read it together?”

[lorenzop]

I'm thinking this thread boils down to: intuition, clairvoyance, lucid dreaming, etc., are these doing science? This is a different question than are they valid means of acquiring knowledge, are they of value to an individual, humanity and the world.

[AshvinP]

I'm thinking this thread boils down to: intuition, clairvoyance, lucid dreaming, etc., are these doing science? This is a different question than are they valid means of acquiring knowledge, are they of value to an individual, humanity and the world.

Not at all. One does not need conscious intuition, clairvoyance, etc. to discern the necessary existence of subtle bodies, for ex, or the Ego-Spirit. One can simply reason through given facts of experience regarding substances and processes in the 'outer' world and within the human organism. It would help if you tried to answer some of the questions we have posed to you, such as:

If, in addition to the physical body, there is a life body, desire body, and ego-complex which regulate and influence the various systems/processes of the human organism, just as substantially and precisely as the physical body, then is there any possibility that this would not be relevant to scientific inquiry and understanding in the domains of chemistry, biology, physiology, etc.? Assuming these subtle members of the human organism to exist for the moment, do you see how there simply cannot exist a genuine science of the human organism without factoring their roles/functions in?

To be clear, in my previous post, I meant to suggest that it is in the very nature of studying the science of body-soul-spirit as a holistic structure, from within our own first-person being, that we are led to what can rightly be called 'moral development' of the individual, humanity, and Earth as a whole.