Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sat Nov 26, 2022 4:06 pm
In what way is spiritual science a science?
Anthony, I guess, like coexistence says, it will be most useful if you think first about what (regular) science means to you. This really boils down to the question: what role does
understanding hold for the human being. And obviously, understanding shouldn't be limited to building an intellectual replica of reality. At the heart of the human condition is this expanding intuitive orientation within reality. Building an intellectual copy of reality has become a thing only in the last few centuries (where we live in intuition only for our own thoughts).
At the core of the question, and where really this East-West split occurs, is our whole soul attitude towards this being of growing intuition that makes sense of reality. One tendency sees this growing orientation as the Sisyphus myth - something grows, emerges from the instinctive depths of reality, then gains local-to-the-soul-bubble intuition of the Cosmos, which however, is seen as a kind of double life, as a specter that grows in intuition but the more it grows, the more incompatible it becomes with the fundamental grounds of reality from whence it has emerged. In other words, our being inflates as a balloon of intuition that recognizes the lawful metamorphoses of reality but all this intuition is felt to be opaque to the true grounds of reality. Thus our human life is felt to be paradoxical, much like the Sisyphus myth, where we grow into something only to realize that the more it grows, the more remote it becomes to the essential foundations of the Cosmos.
But could it be that holistic intuition is one of the poles of reality? I've used this image many times already:
Imagine that you see only the right side. That could correspond to the dark container of consciousness where sparks (white birds) of intuition flock. The more we move to the left, the more intuitive orientation we find within the dynamics of the flock. If we're unaware of the left pole, we feel as if we're building a tower of cards, just like we feel about technology today. Our whole civilization is towering on fragile foundations. We don't even dare to imagine what would happen if, for example, the Internet collapses. Thus we feel similarly about the growing being of intuition. Yeah - it's curious, it's interesting, yet it ultimately alienates us from our true foundations.
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.
This picture is, of course, simplified because it presents existence as a somewhat flat surface that simply doesn't have all the pixels lit, but I believe it makes the point.
I know from what you've said before that you are on the fence about this (although we have spoken about it in a different context). It is interesting to me whether after all this time you have come to recognize better this inner conflict within yourself? Are you able to identify that conflict with something like the above? If you can't identify the root of the conflict as the attitude towards the questionable place of our growing intuitive being, how would you describe it? If you grasp the half-full perspective, would that make more comprehensible why humanity
instinctively seeks to grow into the intuitive being of reality and thus has proliferated philosophy and science in search of such intuition? Would that make it comprehensible why this process should go even further and grow into the intuitive being that weaves beneath the surface of our intellectual ripples? How would you call such a body of growing living intuition of reality - not simply an intellectually-intuitive replica of reality but living resonance with the intuitive forces that weave reality?