Spiritual "science"

[lorenzop]

Lorenzo, may I ask you, what makes you come back to these debates, and experience the same exchange pattern, over and over again?

I wish I knew . . . does Ahwin's use of the term secular science, using the descriptor 'secular' as an insult - doesn't that concern you? How about his Holier than Thou bullying? He is quite the character, his ability to weave BS is unmatched.
I think I feel a wave of strength and courage . . . yes I feel it . . . Goodbye.

[AshvinP]

Lorenzo, may I ask you, what makes you come back to these debates, and experience the same exchange pattern, over and over again?

I wish I knew . . . does Ahwin's use of the term secular science, using the descriptor 'secular' as an insult - doesn't that concern you? How about his Holier than Thou bullying? He is quite the character, his ability to weave BS is unmatched.
I think I feel a wave of strength and courage . . . yes I feel it . . . Goodbye.

Secular isn't an insult, just an objective characterization of what we are dealing with in our modern age. It is most definitely a hindrance to further human evolution, objectively speaking. If one confuses the term 'spiritual' for a dictator God in the sky, or all sorts of exotic supernatural beings and realms, despite all our attempts here to dispel such projections, then criticism of 'secular science' may seem concerning. It may seem like a dogmatic imposition of the sort the 'intelligent design' advocates lobby for in US public schools. But it only seems that way because one is holding the exact same abstract and dualistic understanding of 'spiritual' as the religious fundamentalists. Then one is simply representing the other side of the same coin.

Spiritual means nothing other than our intentional inner activity-life, which is most transparent to us in our thinking-ideational activity. When we see a person making gestures with their arms and hands, we have little problem understanding that this outer physiognomy is the expression of an inner soul-life. Secular science has the most difficult time making that same connection with the outer physiognomy of the natural non-human world (let alone the Cosmic expanses). Even animals are understood as little more than mindless machines at this point, and humans are not far behind from suffering that same fate in the hands of secular science.

If human scientific activity does not take hold of this inner ideational reality in a self-conscious way, then it's easy to see why we are headed for even greater disasters than we have already gone through. It's easy to see why our externalized science will result in more mechanistic automation and weapons of mass destruction rather than avenues to inner freedom and universal brotherhood. These things are becoming less and less a matter of theoretical academia, and more and more a guide to sociopolitical programs in the world. If you insist on feeling offended and threatened by something, then perhaps you should start looking at that, rather than the innocuous terms we are using on this forum in the spirit of finding shared understanding of our collective soul experience.

[Federica]

Lorenzo, may I ask you, what makes you come back to these debates, and experience the same exchange pattern, over and over again?

I wish I knew . . . does Ahwin's use of the term secular science, using the descriptor 'secular' as an insult - doesn't that concern you? How about his Holier than Thou bullying? He is quite the character, his ability to weave BS is unmatched.
I think I feel a wave of strength and courage . . . yes I feel it . . . Goodbye.

Lorenzo,

I noticed that above you have marked this particular word - secular - in glowing red, and you wanted to raise a red flag, but I didn’t understand that concern. For me, secular means mundane, worldly, non-religious, in a neutral way, and I have been reading it in this sense along this thread. It never occurred to me that Ashvin would use it as an insult, and I don’t think he does. Secular science is the science of all our worldly matters, and spiritual science (or knowledge, or wissenschaft) is the knowledge of our thinking, it’s that simple.

But I agree with you that we can gather particular impressions and feelings from conversations. From the same post, for example, you and I could gather very different impressions, although the text is the same. And the way we react to particular words depends a lot on our past experience of that word, or on other workings that operate in us. For example, when Anthony says that he “consumes a body of work” I can tell you, for some reason it bugs me, but I also know that it’s my particular problem, and only mine, so I wouldn’t go to Anthony and say “let me raise a red flag, this is insulting” because of course it’s not, and he’s fully entitled to use the expression.

Lorenzo, I think the reason why you are drawn to this forum might be - I am sure you have noticed that - nobody here never ignored any of your questions. When you ask or share something here, you can be certain that it will be taken seriously, no matter what, and it will be addressed at length. Your thoughts have always been considered worth the exchange, to the extent you have been up to it. Also, I believe that a part of you tells you that there's something asking to be understood, and you are sensitive to that inner call, even if it’s not a clear call. So I hope you will stick with us, and keep on following and posting, because these conversations, even amidst misunderstandings and unpleasant feelings, can indeed help clarify that which asks to be understood within us.

[Anthony66]

Just to start from your thought, in your Bayesian reasoning you are making an undue assumption of equal likelihood through time of that prior probability, as if the evolution of consciousness did not exist, as if through history the possibility to access spiritual wissenschaft had been fixed and given for the people of 100, 1000, or 2000 years ago alike. Does this make any sense? Is this an appropriate framework of analysis?

We don't have to go back thousands of years to find those who have claimed special knowledge. Today we have the Roman Catholics (pope speaking ex cathedra), Jehovah Witnesses (Watch Tower), Mormons (burning in the bosom), fundamentalist evangelicals (witness of the Holy Spirit), and Pentecostals (words of knowledge) to name just a few. We could go on to highlight various cults before shifting our attention to the East.

More generally, you don’t need to cast your checkered net of prior probability assessment reasoning, looking at the abstract event of ‘knowledge being accessed by some hypothetical, time-neutral human head’ wandering in some thrown up world-bubble picture. Isn’t this reasoning being sketched by You-Right-Now? Are you not the active author of these thoughts? Then take responsibility for them, you can’t call yourself out of the equation and, from the hiding place of your speculating vantage point, borrow Bayes' sunglasses and rock the catwalk with these, because you feel like. This whole idea is flowing through your own creative thinking agency, you have to acknowledge that!

At this point I can but reason through the best epistemic tools I am familiar with. Yes I can acknowledge that this is flowing through my creative thinking agency, but at this point, that acknowledgement offers me no additional tools for my calculus. Hopefully that will change!

Anthony, If we unfold the Bayesian grid we will surely get Bayesian results. If we go for the Barbie house, we’ll get Barbie-like results. If we look through the sunglasses above, we’ll get chaotic colored dot series, and nothing else. But we don’t have to do any of these houses of cards, when we ourselves have under the scope of our willed initiative the instant possibility to take a direct no-matter-how-little step, free from any arbitrary set of hypotheses! And it’s not true that one has to take the plunge to get access to 'evidence'. Developing spiritual wissenschaft is a continuous (in mathematical sense) progression where every little step grants proportionate, directly experienced ‘evidence’. If you have the feeling that you have not experienced any evidence so far, it must be because you have not yet accepted to let go of the intellectual grid, and to put yourself at the center of your spiritual experience.

The problem is I have no directly experienced actionable evidence. So I must reason from my skeptical low prior probability and bolster that with the arguments made for SS. That puts me in the "hopefully optimistic" camp that SS will in fact prove to provide "special knowledge". So I will continue to read, try to absorb the intuitive challenges, do the concentration and meditation exercises, and hope the lights come on!

[Federica]

Thanks Anthony, I’m happy that you're still here!

We don't have to go back thousands of years to find those who have claimed special knowledge. Today we have the Roman Catholics (pope speaking ex cathedra), Jehovah Witnesses (Watch Tower), Mormons (burning in the bosom), fundamentalist evangelicals (witness of the Holy Spirit), and Pentecostals (words of knowledge) to name just a few. We could go on to highlight various cults before shifting our attention to the East.

Yes. Here’s how I see it, I'll share my reflections. These religions and cults of our time all come with their more or less fantastical claims of truth. These truths are all revealed knowledge, correct? No matter what exact knowledge is concerned and how special it is, the suggested path to come to acquire the knowledge involves an act of faith, or blind belief. That’s what they all have in common: the adept is requested to surrender their will, their feeling, and their thinking to a superior agency, which is revealed to them. And the tricky part is that once total surrender has happened, it’s hardly possible to draw any limits to the devotion. Every claim of knowledge and every behavioral request could become acceptable, as long as it becomes endorsed from within the revelation, or any extended and revised version of it. Clearly, this opens the way to all sorts of potential abuse.
I understand that you were familiar with one such system, before you decided to dissociate yourself from it, and to start guarding against the type of manipulation that can happen in connection with churches and cults. Fantastic! Now, what is the antidote for the risks that can hide in revealed truth, when it's used as a tool for undue influence? My impression is that you thought: “Science is the antidote. If I only stick to ‘evidence’ - objective truth that does not require anything else than observation and report, like in current academic scientific method, then I’m sure manipulation is averted.” So maybe the hypothesis within which you have started your new life has been: “In terms of approaches to knowledge, there’s either cults, or science, the former is vulnerable to manipulation, the latter isn't ”. If this is more or less correct, I can guess that, when spiritual science has been mentioned, your intention has been to decide whether SS can be put on one or the other side of this demarcation line. Is it a science, or is it a cult?


[Anthony it turns out I have to attend to something now, I'll continue later on, but I want to post the above in the meantime, so in case you or anyone else want to comment in the meantime, I can correct and recalculate when I'm back]

[AshvinP]

Just to start from your thought, in your Bayesian reasoning you are making an undue assumption of equal likelihood through time of that prior probability, as if the evolution of consciousness did not exist, as if through history the possibility to access spiritual wissenschaft had been fixed and given for the people of 100, 1000, or 2000 years ago alike. Does this make any sense? Is this an appropriate framework of analysis?

We don't have to go back thousands of years to find those who have claimed special knowledge. Today we have the Roman Catholics (pope speaking ex cathedra), Jehovah Witnesses (Watch Tower), Mormons (burning in the bosom), fundamentalist evangelicals (witness of the Holy Spirit), and Pentecostals (words of knowledge) to name just a few. We could go on to highlight various cults before shifting our attention to the East.

More generally, you don’t need to cast your checkered net of prior probability assessment reasoning, looking at the abstract event of ‘knowledge being accessed by some hypothetical, time-neutral human head’ wandering in some thrown up world-bubble picture. Isn’t this reasoning being sketched by You-Right-Now? Are you not the active author of these thoughts? Then take responsibility for them, you can’t call yourself out of the equation and, from the hiding place of your speculating vantage point, borrow Bayes' sunglasses and rock the catwalk with these, because you feel like. This whole idea is flowing through your own creative thinking agency, you have to acknowledge that!

At this point I can but reason through the best epistemic tools I am familiar with. Yes I can acknowledge that this is flowing through my creative thinking agency, but at this point, that acknowledgement offers me no additional tools for my calculus. Hopefully that will change!

Anthony, If we unfold the Bayesian grid we will surely get Bayesian results. If we go for the Barbie house, we’ll get Barbie-like results. If we look through the sunglasses above, we’ll get chaotic colored dot series, and nothing else. But we don’t have to do any of these houses of cards, when we ourselves have under the scope of our willed initiative the instant possibility to take a direct no-matter-how-little step, free from any arbitrary set of hypotheses! And it’s not true that one has to take the plunge to get access to 'evidence'. Developing spiritual wissenschaft is a continuous (in mathematical sense) progression where every little step grants proportionate, directly experienced ‘evidence’. If you have the feeling that you have not experienced any evidence so far, it must be because you have not yet accepted to let go of the intellectual grid, and to put yourself at the center of your spiritual experience.

The problem is I have no directly experienced actionable evidence. So I must reason from my skeptical low prior probability and bolster that with the arguments made for SS. That puts me in the "hopefully optimistic" camp that SS will in fact prove to provide "special knowledge". So I will continue to read, try to absorb the intuitive challenges, do the concentration and meditation exercises, and hope the lights come on!

I will share some thoughts in the meantime. As Federica alluded, our modern habit is to set up either/or with respect to outer judgments - is this a science or a pseudo-science (or cult)? Is this in accord with the objective 'evidence' or not? Of course that can be a useful approach within the horizontal sensory spectrum, but when we go into the vertical depth structure we need much more flexibility. The either/or judgment then needs to become an inner one, relating not to the abstract content of dogmas, theories and models, but to the living mode of spiritual activity itself. We can think about why are we using the Bayesian probability grid in matters of spiritual investigation at this point in time - what does it signify about the course of human evolution and our individual evolution embedded within that?

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both [living and dead thinking]."

Anthony, you are pointing to a very understandable fear of modern thinking, which is that we will simply lose ourselves into a void of unknowing, forced to rely on blind dogma, if we let go of the old habits. And that would be the case if we had nothing to replace those old habits with; nothing which could redeem those old habits from their abstract rigidity. But when we do have such an alternative - living thinking - the old habits simply clutter up our soul-space and prevent new impulses from flowing in.  

"Do not put old wine into new wineskins or else both will be ruined."

In the background of our consciousness we are implicitly denying the living spiritual world with our skeptical Bayesian probabilities while hoping to also discover it through meditation. I am not sure and perhaps this can be overcome with sufficiently powerful meditation, and I would recommend to pursue the concentration exercises regardless, which may be more important than meditation in this situation, but these are unnecessary intellectual obstacles we put on our path. We should be clear that 'living thinking' doesn't necessarily mean higher Imaginative cognition, although that is one of the goals along the way. It is exactly as Federica says - "This whole idea is flowing through your own creative thinking agency, you have to acknowledge that!"

Or, as Cleric said before, it is simply an unwinding of previous prejudices, passions, dogmas, theories, etc. that we impose on our thinking perception of the World Process, thereby blocking higher impulses from streaming in which allow us to perceive our own Thinking before it condenses into rigid conceptual forms. Then we have the means to truly acknowledge and take more creative responsibility for the Ideas flowing through us into our conceptual thinking. We would do well to meditate on That which inspires our conscientious thinking to say - "So I will continue to read, try to absorb the intuitive challenges, do the concentration and meditation exercises, and hope the lights come on!" We should always be willing to venture a level deeper than we are normally comfortable with, into the unexplored depths where the (thinking) snake feels like it is eating its own tail. 

I came across an interesting passage from Steiner:

Existence here, as such, is of no value to these souls. In the spiritual life it really is the case that one confronts pure spiritual beings. They affect one. But one must first acquire perception for them. It is thus: one stands in the spiritual world; behind one stand souls belonging to the spiritual hierarchies, Angels, Archangels, and so on. One knows they are there. But if a man is to perceive them, he must first arouse them into that which one here calls ‘existence.’ That which in the spiritual world works on one, must be brought into an ‘Imagination.’ That which is ‘non-awakened being,’ to which man does nothing, which simply exists of itself, that is of no value in the spiritual world. Here man stands on the earth, and is surrounded by nature. But the spiritual world demands that man should raise himself up to it, for it is not there without further ado. To have nature around one requires no special trouble. It exists, as it were, of itself. Therefore the materialistic love to have nature around them. But in the spiritual world nature is no longer there. For man, there only exists in the spiritual world that which he himself continuously works at. There he has to be continually active. That which is there, is the other world, that world which man has forsaken, to which he continually looks back, as though to a world of existence. The world, which carries the transitory within itself, continually battles with the non-existent. If for one moment the world so beloved by the materialists were to disappear, if men were to know nothing of their bodies, but first had to create the ‘imagination’ of them, if they were to know nothing of the table until they had created it for themselves in thought, but could instead see the spiritual world — then they would have in this life here below what they have there in the spiritual world. Those in the spiritual world can only bring it to perception by their own activity. The ‘other world’ — our own world here below — is always present. Whereas here the heaven is hidden and only the world which is round us is always present, there the surrounding world is hidden unless we ourselves bring it into vision by our own efforts. For one who can have immediate cognisance of it, it is easy there to believe in the ‘world beyond,’ which is our present one. But consider from the standpoint of the spiritual that which makes this world of ours, I might almost say, disagreeable, is its permeation with existence. It is a disturbing fact that it is permeated with existence — that really is disturbing. Many say: ‘A spiritual world indeed! — I would willingly believe in one if I could only see it! If I could see it while here!’ We may compare that remark with what the souls in the spiritual world say: ‘We might endure that physical world continually existing down there if only it was not permanently present. If only it were not so permeated with being. We cannot look down on to the earth without seeing in every part of it this terrible existence.’

If we really reflect deeply on our anxieties during waking life, then we will find much of it boils down to the fact that things just exist around us, independently of our own activity. Things just appear and disappear, shift and transform, seemingly without any connection to our own willpower and ideas. We can't anticipate most of it and, when we feel that we can, it continually defies our expectations. It keeps on taking us by surprise because the deeper flow of spiritual activity is veiled, while the very finished products of that activity just appear like in the dreamscape of Cleric's metaphor. We get injured or sick or betrayed by a loved one and have no idea why this happened. That is the struggle of the intellectual-sensory world for modern man - that is the Maya of passive "existence" which makes us suffer, but which we are so familiar with that we often decide it is "better to be a beggar in the upper world [physical plane] than a king in the realm of Shades." 

That is what is being called "special knowledge" here - knowledge which comes through our own activity - our living thinking - rather than simply appearing to us passively through the sensory spectrum. Modern initiation towards living thinking and Imagination is about experiencing more and more of the Spirit pole of consciousness in which we are always active, which we normally only experience after death, while we are still alive. By becoming more active and directing our thinking towards Thinking, we are increasing our resonance with this counter-pole of our Consciousness which is always present and working into the phenomenal world. If we cling on to the passive habits of abstract thinking in the sensory world, then we are only making this resonance much more difficult, if not impossible, to attain. We are expecting and hoping the spiritual realities to simply present themselves to us as the sensory spectrum does, independently of our own activity.

Again, the actual concentration and meditation exercises, if carried out diligently with good will, should always help. But there is also no need to work at cross-purposes with ourselves by holding these old habits in the background, as we may then find we end up loving what is dead and despising what is seeking a new life within us.

[AshvinP]

For anyone interested, there is a very clear and comprehensive lecture from Steiner on this topic, which should complement a lot of what was posted here.

____________________________

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/ReinImmo ... 24p01.html
It is often said today that when man's spiritual life is in a confused, chaotic condition and human souls have lost their courage, their confidence, and their hope for the future, then all kinds of occult and mystical endeavors are likely to spring up. And in circles which are not inclined to make exact distinctions, Anthroposophy is often reckoned among such endeavors. This evening's subject, which concerns the nature of Anthroposophy, is intended to show you how little it is justified to confuse anthroposophical research with much else with which it is often confused today. Anthroposophy starts from that scientific seriousness and conscientious exactitude which have been developed particularly in the natural sciences in the course of recent centuries and especially in the nineteenth century. Anthroposophy, however, seeks to develop what can be achieved within certain limits by natural science, up to what can be called the supersensory worlds, up to the comprehension of those fundamental riddles with which the deepest longings of the human soul are concerned, the longing for the comprehension of the eternal in the human soul and of the relation of this soul to the divine, spiritual foundations of existence.

Although Anthroposophy begins from scientific foundations, it had to develop — since it is concerned with these comprehensive problems which concern all human beings — in such a way that it comes to meet the understanding of the simplest human heart, and the practical needs of human souls and spirits at the present time, when there is so much need for inner steadiness and certainty, for strength in action, and for faith in mankind and its destiny. Anthroposophy had to come to meet varied social and religious endeavors in the way that I will describe this evening, although having itself a thoroughly scientific origin. But Anthroposophy must take more seriously than do many who believe that they are standing on the firm basis of present-day scientific research, the possibilities which this research leaves open. Anthroposophy has to contemplate with particular attentiveness what are regarded by some careful thinkers today as the limits of science.

If we use the methods of scientific research, observation of the sense world, experiment, and thought, which combines the results of observation and experiment, and find in this way the laws of nature as we are accustomed to regard them, we easily come to the conviction that this research has its limits. It cannot reach beyond the world of the senses and its laws, and cannot comprehend more of the human being than that part of it which belongs to this sense world as the human physical, bodily nature. It has to accept that it has limits as far as the real value, dignity, and being of man are concerned, and that it cannot penetrate the real soul and spirit of man. Anthroposophy, if it seeks to be taken seriously, has to take conscientious account of these things. It has to see this danger seriously: one may not arbitrarily extend that thinking which has been acquired in natural science, beyond the sense world. It would be arbitrary to do so because this manner of thought has acquired its strength and its training through the use of the senses and at once becomes empty, vague and unsatisfactory if it attempts by itself to penetrate to regions which are beyond the sense world. You know that there are certain philosophical speculations, through which thought by itself attempts to go from the sense-given data to the supersensory. Such thinking, relying upon itself alone, attempts to make all sorts of logical inferences which lead from the temporal to the eternal. But anyone who in an unprejudiced way makes the attempt to satisfy the needs of his soul for a knowledge of the eternal through such logical inferences will soon be dissatisfied, for he will recognize that this thinking, which can observe the beings and phenomena of nature so confidently, must at once lose its confidence when it leaves the realms accessible to the senses. Hence the conflict of different philosophical systems; each chooses according to its subjective peculiarities the way in which it leads beyond the world of the senses and develops its own theory. No harmonious, satisfactory conception of the world can come about in this way. Anthroposophy has to see clearly how an unprejudiced mind must regard such ways of thought, which rely upon themselves alone. Here it sees one danger which must be overcome if the eternal in man and in the universe is to be truly known.

Thus Anthroposophy recognizes the limits set to our knowledge of nature, and it must recognize on the other hand how some more far-reaching minds look elsewhere for the help in answering the great riddles of existence, which natural science cannot give them. They turn to what is called mysticism or inner contemplation, where the soul seeks to turn and to descend into its own depths, and to discover there what cannot be found by science, or in the ordinary consciousness. But he who takes the search for the eternal as seriously as the anthroposophist must do, has to recognize in these other paths the illusions into which such mystics often fall. Anyone who can observe the life of the human soul without prejudice knows the meaning of the human memory in the whole life of the soul. Memories have their origin in the external perceptions of the senses; here we receive our impressions. We call up again the pictures of such impressions from our memories, often years later, and it may then happen that some external sense impression has been received by our soul, perhaps half unconsciously, without being observed with the necessary attentiveness. It has sunk into the furthest depths of the soul, and it comes up again, intentionally or unintentionally, years later. It may not reappear in its original form, but changed in such a way that it will only be recognized by someone with an exact knowledge of the soul's life. What was originally stirred in the soul by an outer impression has been received by all kinds of feelings and impulses of will, received indeed by the organic, bodily constitution; it may arise in the soul years later, entirely changed. He who has taken hold of it may believe that what is really only a transformed sense impression, which has passed through the most varied metamorphoses and has reappeared during mystical self-immersion, is the revelation of something that is eternal and does not originate from the external world of the senses. Anthroposophy has to see how mystics, who look for their revelations in this way, fall into the most grievous illusions; and it has to recognize that such mysticism is a second danger. It has to overcome the dangers which arise both at the limits of our knowledge of nature and at the limits of our own human soul life.

I had to say this first, in order that it can be seen how conscientiously Anthroposophy is alert to all the sources of error which can arise. For I will now describe the ways Anthroposophy itself adopts in order to reach the spiritual, supersensory worlds. I will have to describe much that is paradoxical, much that today is quite unusual.

It is easy to believe, and many people do believe, that Anthroposophy is nothing but a more or less fantastic attempt to acquire knowledge of worlds with which serious scientific research should have nothing to do. Anthroposophy sees clearly, in what ways knowledge about the spiritual is NOT to be achieved and in this way comes to a starting point for genuine research. Having learned about the ways which can lead to illusions and errors, it reaches a real preliminary answer to this question. It can say: With the ordinary powers of knowledge which we have in everyday life, and which are used by our recognized sciences, it is not possible to go further (because of the limits of our knowledge of nature and of mystical self-immersion) than external nature, and what is received by a man from this external nature into the life of his soul. If we are to reach further, we must call on powers in the soul's life which in our ordinary existence are still asleep, and of which man is ordinarily unconscious. Anthroposophy develops such sleeping powers in the soul in order that, when they are awakened, they can achieve knowledge of realms to which our ordinary powers cannot reach. Serious and exact researchers do indeed already speak today about all sorts of abnormal powers of the human soul, or of the human organism, through which they try to show that man is involved in other relationships than those recognized by ordinary biology or physiology. But Anthroposophy is not concerned with such abnormal powers of the soul either. It uses the normal powers of the human soul life, but develops these further. For this one thing is indeed necessary from the first which I would like to call intellectual modesty.

[Cleric K]

For anyone interested, there is a very clear and comprehensive lecture from Steiner on this topic, which should complement a lot of what was posted here.

Great find! For those who didn't read it, I would just quote the last paragraph which really places things in the context of this thread:

I would like to sum up, as in a picture, what I have tried to describe as the nature of Anthroposophy. We have the human being before us; we see the form of his physical body. We only come to know his whole being when we see how his physiognomy is the expression of his soul and spirit. We have in natural science, which is fully recognized in its justified purposes by Anthroposophy, in a sense the knowledge of the external body of the world. In the natural science of the physical we have something that is itself a kind of intellectual body. Just as we have only the whole of man before us when his soul and spirit is revealed through his physical bodily nature, in the same way we have the knowledge of the world in its entirety, only when as if through a kind of wonderful physiognomy, through all that science offers us in its facts, its experiments, its hypotheses, its natural laws — a cosmic knowledge in soul and spirit comes to expression. For that body of knowledge, given in external natural science, Anthroposophy seeks to be the soul and spirit of a real and complete knowledge of man and of the world.

It should be noted that at the time of Steiner, science was much more fit for the name 'Natural'. Think of Botany, Zoology, Geology. These sciences were really trying to conceptualize the physiognomy of Nature. The search for the mathematical foundations of Nature (which is the first to think of when we hear 'science' in our day) only became a plausible dream in the second half of the 19th century, especially with the success of Maxwell's equations which really sparked the enthusiasm that there could be unified mathematical foundations of Nature (remember that before that there were a number of isolated mathematical laws like Ampere's law, Gauss' law, Faraday's law and so on). It is really in the beginning of the twentieth century that things picked up speed and scientists began to speak of a Theory Of Everything with much confidence.

If we're able to survey our scientific evolution with unprejudiced eye, we'll see that in a way, today's mathematical science already instinctively tries to find the soul and spirit of Nature's physiognomy. This is really a difficult part for the philosophy of science because even though it speaks of quantum fields as the truly real stuff of the world, it's not clear why they should obey laws that are graspable in thought. In other words, it's difficult to separate today's science from a kind of idealism - we extract from our mathematical ideas, relations that somewhat mimic the way Nature's physiognomy appears to our senses. Of course very few scientists would actually think of mathematical ideas as something real. Instead, what lives in human thought is seen only as a subjective shadow of the true laws. Some will go even further and declare that there are no laws in any conceivable sense, and all that exists is the sensory physiognomy of nature. Mathematical laws are a human artifact through which we try to systemize our perceptions. Alas, as the ToE is nowhere near in sight, many scientist begin to adopt this view. Especially with the advent of machine learning, where we can now train mathematical functions to mimic folding of proteins or galaxy clusters, there's little doubt that we're indeed only finding ways to draw mathematical pictures of reality's appearances. It's clear that the trained AI model is only an optimized function, there's no elegant mathematical law in it. It is perfectly clear that it only approximates the measured quantities, yet it has practical value. Thus many scientists today think that "Maybe this is really all we can do. Who said that human thinking doing mathematical relations, should be able to capture Nature's laws? Furthermore, such an attempt already implies that Nature operates on mathematical laws, which already smells of idealism and we know how superstitious that is. Maybe we simply have to accept the fact that Nature will forever remain a black box that we can asymptotically predict with our intellectual tools but we shouldn't delude ourselves that there are such things as 'laws of nature." For anyone who still has some sense of inner reality, this tendency should be felt as one of the scariest things possible. It practically threatens to exclude completely soul and spirit from our experience of reality and remain only in Nature's physiognomy mimicked by ghostly thoughts.

That's why the logical entry to spiritual science is through deeper experience of thinking - this is where soul and spirit become perceptible. Science today produces mathematical thinking but doesn't want to observe within itself how Nature works in that. It only wants to build an abstract model of that process. In other words, there's still a disconnect - modern thinking still can't connect the dots and see reality as a Mobius strip. If this connection is made, it will become clear that the more we gain deeper knowledge of ourselves and the way soul and spirit express in our physiognomy (which starts with the living experience of thinking), the more we understand also the soul and spirit of Nature (with which we are one) which express themselves as the opaque side of the Mobius strip, as the physiognomy of Nature.

[Federica]

Thanks Anthony, I’m happy that you're still here!

We don't have to go back thousands of years to find those who have claimed special knowledge. Today we have the Roman Catholics (pope speaking ex cathedra), Jehovah Witnesses (Watch Tower), Mormons (burning in the bosom), fundamentalist evangelicals (witness of the Holy Spirit), and Pentecostals (words of knowledge) to name just a few. We could go on to highlight various cults before shifting our attention to the East.

Yes. Here’s how I see it, I'll share my reflections. These religions and cults of our time all come with their more or less fantastical claims of truth. These truths are all revealed knowledge, correct? No matter what exact knowledge is concerned and how special it is, the suggested path to come to acquire the knowledge involves an act of faith, or blind belief. That’s what they all have in common: the adept is requested to surrender their will, their feeling, and their thinking to a superior agency, which is revealed to them. And the tricky part is that once total surrender has happened, it’s hardly possible to draw any limits to the devotion. Every claim of knowledge and every behavioral request could become acceptable, as long as it becomes endorsed from within the revelation, or any extended and revised version of it. Clearly, this opens the way to all sorts of potential abuse.
I understand that you were familiar with one such system, before you decided to dissociate yourself from it, and to start guarding against the type of manipulation that can happen in connection with churches and cults. Fantastic! Now, what is the antidote for the risks that can hide in revealed truth, when it's used as a tool for undue influence? My impression is that you thought: “Science is the antidote. If I only stick to ‘evidence’ - objective truth that does not require anything else than observation and report, like in current academic scientific method, then I’m sure manipulation is averted.” So maybe the hypothesis within which you have started your new life has been: “In terms of approaches to knowledge, there’s either cults, or science, the former is vulnerable to manipulation, the latter isn't ”. If this is more or less correct, I can guess that, when spiritual science has been mentioned, your intention has been to decide whether SS can be put on one or the other side of this demarcation line. Is it a science, or is it a cult?


[Anthony it turns out I have to attend to something now, I'll continue later on, but I want to post the above in the meantime, so in case you or anyone else want to comment in the meantime, I can correct and recalculate when I'm back]

Resuming from above, replacing ‘spiritual science’ with ‘Anthroposophy’ everywhere.


Are we ashamed of our living thinking?


So, is Anthroposophy a science or a cult? First of all, as Ashvin said, it’s coercive and misleading to force the thinking flow into either/or ‘switches’ like so. Think of a magnificent mountain torrent streaming downhill, the water dances and sings in untamed and ever novel combinations of swirls, falls and spouts. That’s how our thinking could flow, in harmony with its (spiritual) environment. Now think of long, concrete edges being built alongside that mountain stream, and of dams installed to streamline the current. The character of the waterflow is now totally different, at odds with its natural environment. Our thinking flow too has become estranged from its spiritual environment, in the constriction of external grids.

Metaphors again and again? Yes... It seems to me that one very basic, but significant, way to start harmonizing our thinking within its natural (spiritual) environment is precisely to allow ourselves to welcome such metaphors when they come to mind, like the torrent image here. Today we have a strong inner resistance to noticing, let alone expressing, such images. We push them away, we think they are childish. We think it’s much better to come up with a clean, elegant, abstract reasoning to speak our mind. What serious thinker today would speak of torrents and what not, to make a logical argument about anything? It would just be plain ridiculous!

I believe we have come to feel ashamed of our living thinking, afraid to sound like a 5 year-old, or like a gauche version of an ancient poet. Similarly, one might resist, and even judge, the use of these colorful highlighters in posts, for example: “I’m not a 12 year-old whimsical school-kid, am I”. My impression is, these are great attuning habits, like warmups, to make our normal thinking more playable and harmonious, even prior to any concentration or meditation. I believe it says to the spheres: “Hey I am ready to play with you, or at least, I would like to be ready!” In this sense it’s also a gesture of humility. It says: “I used to be proud of the sleek and fashionable intellectual framework, Bayesian or whatever. I used to express ideas in the form of these sharp silhouettes, and enjoy the intellectual high, feeling so evolved and self-complacent, but I now recognize self-indulgence in that, and I want to be more truthful to the authentic nature of this thinking force I am a part of.”


Anthroposophy is neither a cult nor a science


Back to our original question, we can say that Anthroposophy is not a cult. There’s no invitation to blindly surrender to revelations. If we can’t get all the fantastical claims of knowledge just yet, it’s for the same reason why I can’t grasp advanced mathematical theorems today. I haven’t studied the required materials, that’s why.
Anthroposophy is not science either, in the sense of contemporary science, because it doesn’t expound parallel representations of reality (models) as sandboxes for our mind to play around in them. That spiritual science pursues knowledge along a third way makes sense, because it puts thinking at the center of inquiry, that very faculty we employ in all forms of knowledge attainment. One could object, psychology and philosophy also inquire thinking. They do, but to a major extent, present-day psychology and philosophy approach thinking as an external scientific object, by building its hypotheses-induced, simplified replica as a gym in which thoughts can train, and their lactic acid of evidence can be milked. As Wayfarer said, and I believe him, present-day philosophy has become “sterile and often meaningless academic jargonese”. I can imagine how those outcomes are sterile, to the extent they belong in the sandbox, not in reality.

So in the mainstream, scientific approach to thinking today, the thinking-I is steamrolled by itself to build a conceptually external model of itself to be inquired as an object from outside, but still by means of the thinking agency (how else) residing inside the self… for simplicity. In other words, thinking is supposed to understand itself through an external model of thinking, even though thinking only can operate from within the center of the first person perspective. Then, something lures it into trivializing or forgetting such redeployment of itself, by itself, in the form of an abstracted replica. In Anthroposophy, one doesn't even start this dissociative game. Instead, we keep our thinking one with itself, and we dive into it as is, immediately, not as if we were doing it as an experiment in some hypothetical parallel sandbox.


We should be careful of what we are doing when we invoke science and evidence


In such exercise of Anthroposophy, we do expect to develop a solid, objective, external, data-based knowledge that can be taught and learned. We can expect to develop a scientia, which indeed will be much more comforting and reassuring than secular science, for the one who is weary of never again falling prey to manipulation and unsubstantiated claims. As Ashvin said: “We rarely consider just how much of the 'publicly available' results from secular methods that we take on faith and take for granted in all our scientific contemplation.” We can certainly grant that the scientific method works quite well in hard sciences, natural sciences, where the sensory spectrum is inquired. In the post above, Cleric has explained how such science, effective in terms of usable findings that follow the contours of nature's physiognomy, is heading towards extreme dualism when it comes to its mindset. As BK once put it, such science is useful to find out how the sensory spectrum behaves, not what it is.

But if we now look at how the scientific method is applied outside natural sciences - in social sciences, economics, psychology, consciousness studies, etc. - it’s impossible to escape the realization that, more often than not, the sandbox, in which all evidence is gathered and all conclusions are drawn, is conjured up so far away from reality, it's so simplified, than we can only walk the way back to reality (and accept that the conclusions from the sandbox are true for real) by means of an enormous leap of faith. Nonetheless, we still believe in those sandboxes, as if they explained reality, because they look and feel so sleek and intelligent. We have been taught by Mainstream that scientific method is a good, objective, reliable, authoritative, and consensual approach to knowledge, while spirit is dubious, unverifyable, unreliable and ambiguous. We also get regular friendly reminders of such state of affairs. Today it’s still more or less ok to be spiritual - we are told - for wellbeing purposes, “if it works for us”, but we should be clear, spirit is not knowledge. Basically, spirituality is a life add-on. Some might benefit from it, be it, as a self-care strategy, especially if they are struggling with life, but they should keep it within the private sphere, and most of all, they should not fantasize that one can go from spirit to knowledge. Science is the way there. One is a staple, the other is completely optional. That’s why every time we call for ‘science’ as the safest way to knowledge, we don't even need to be specific. We know that we will automatically gain reflected authority, consensus, reliability, etcetera, in front of our peers, anyway, and we got so used to that instant acceptance and gratification, that invoking science has become automatic behavior. It cannot harm, we think.

That’s why we need to be very careful. I wrote above that knowledge by revelation is potentially risky, because it opens the way to manipulation. Well, there is today a non-negligible risk to fall prey to such manipulation when we blindly invoke not only the cults of our time, but also the scientific method, if we don't know what we are talking about exactly (not saying that you are doing it, Anthony, but it's a very common, indicative behavior). A few know what they are talking about, I grant that, but the vast majority does not make any check whatsoever. We often hold a very dim idea of what we are stating, when we invoke evidence and science. In other words, we are on a path of faith, although we don’t know it, and we would not admit it. We invoke “Oh Evidence”, we believe that we are being rational and objective, and get 100% social acceptance and rewards while we are at it, no scrutiny required. The most evanescent shadow of scrutiny is enough, so we can feel rational. This is very easy to check. If you ask people, including ourselves, often times we have no idea whatsoever what the scientific mantra we recite consists of, in detail. Usually at the first or second inquisitive question, answers become very vague, of the type “everyone knows that” or “if it wasn't like that, someone would have told us”. It's scary to realize how many daily decisions we make on such foundations, I am of course no exception in that. We are all exposed. Then, when it comes to the fantastical claims of Anthroposophy, we suddenly switch gears and become the most demanding skeptics. So there is a phenomenon of widespread, unassumed, faith in scientific method as a secure way to true knowledge in every pursuit, that we need to guard against, especially in fields of inquiry that span beyond the sensory spectrum.


We already took the plunge


For these reasons, it seems to me that Anthroposophy appears as the safest and (paradoxically) most down-to-earth method, or scientia, in Latin sense, to inquire thinking and to attain spiritual knowledge. I will conclude with a guess. I have been reading your words, trying to inhabit the perspective they come from, and here’s the impression I’m getting. You say “I hope the lights come on”, and earlier you spoke of “the plunge" one needs to take. There are thoughts of discontinuity in these words. You seem to believe that a remarkable, discrete event should happen, a plunge, or a change of state.

My impression, from the perspective of my minuscule point of progression on the path, is that there is no plunge to be taken. We are already in the water, immersed in the pool. We are already endowed with thinking. What we need to do is to simply stop grabbing the edge, and start swimming towards the center of the pool. We already can swim, we can move our available thinking function, but we need to trust our ability enough, to dare to quit our stronghold, to release the grip to the edge of vicarious, sandbox thinking, and “venture a little deeper than we are normally comfortable with”, to the center of the pool.

[AshvinP]

Yes. Here’s how I see it, I'll share my reflections.
...
In such exercise of Anthroposophy, we do expect to develop a solid, objective, external, data-based knowledge that can be taught and learned. We can expect to develop a scientia, which indeed will be much more comforting and reassuring than secular science, for the one who is weary of never again falling prey to manipulation and unsubstantiated claims. As Ashvin said: “We rarely consider just how much of the 'publicly available' results from secular methods that we take on faith and take for granted in all our scientific contemplation.” We can certainly grant that the scientific method works quite well in hard sciences, natural sciences, where the sensory spectrum is inquired. In the post above, Cleric has explained how such science, effective in terms of usable findings that follow the contours of nature's physiognomy, is heading towards extreme dualism when it comes to its mindset. As BK once put it, such science is useful to find out how the sensory spectrum behaves, not what it is.

But if we now look at how the scientific method is applied outside natural sciences - in social sciences, economics, psychology, consciousness studies, etc. - it’s impossible to escape the realization that, more often than not, the sandbox, in which all evidence is gathered and all conclusions are drawn, is conjured up so far away from reality, it's so simplified, than we can only walk the way back to reality (and accept that the conclusions from the sandbox are true for real) by means of an enormous leap of faith. Nonetheless, we still believe in those sandboxes, as if they explained reality, because they look and feel so sleek and intelligent.

Great reflections! The above is a critical point to consider. This faith-based approach to our modern 'scientific' understanding becomes crystal clear as we cross the inversion horizon of the outer-inner threshold. There is the positive faith in all the shallow theoretical 'explanations' for various phenomena, and also the negative faith in the dogma that 99.9% of all phenomena we experience simply have no lawful explanation, will be explained in some indefinite future time (even though we can't currently imagine how this physical explanation may arise and are not making any progress towards it), or can only be explained vaguely with concepts such as, "it helped us survive millions of years of ago". We are all familiar with the big ones like the negative faith in the origin of life or consciousness, but we will also find this extends to practically every aspect of our soul experience. Most of that experience is simply felt as not needing any scientific explanation, for ex. how do we meet people and form various social relationships in life? It's really remarkable how little wonder and curiosity is left for these sorts of relationships which structure vast amounts of our daily experience.

Related to this faith-based approach to secular science, I was trying to remember where I had seen the Bayesian probability analysis employed before. Then it occurred to me that the religious fundamentalists also use it to 'prove' the historical events of the Gospels, such as the existence, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ Jesus! They use it to say that the most probable explanation for various isolated historical facts - like the women at the tomb, the conversion of Saul to Paul, the appearance of the resurrected Jesus to various people, etc. - is that they actually happened. So we see, inquiry into the Christ events has been sucked into the materialistic habit of thinking which cuts itself off from the depth structure of spiritual activity, just like the rest of modern world-conceptions. The only option is to then bring down Cosmic realities to the shape and size of intellectual thoughts and historical probability 'proofs', i.e. to recapitulate the Fall, rather than to lay hold of the Christ impulse towards the rebirth and ascension of intellectual thinking into its Cosmic reality, thereby redeeming and inverting the Fall. 

Just as Federica said, often we locate the dogmatic, faith-based thinking in everyone else but we never think to look for it in ourselves. We end up criticizing others as an unconscious means of expressing what we don't like about our own horizontal thinking and our own soul tendencies which reinforce it. These are very important soul dynamics for us to pay attention to and can really help develop our living thinking. We then realize that the atheists/skeptics/mystics criticize the fundamentalists and similar spiritualists when they are both playing the exact same dogmatic game by the same horizontal thinking rules. This was already happening in Steiner's day and he could anticipate how it must continue to develop further in times to come, especially within the sphere of Christianity. The below passage could have just as well been written by Anthony!

Because men are becoming more and more individual, an attempt should be made for anyone to describe his inner experiences completely freed from dogma to another, in such a way that the latter might also be able to develop his own free life of religious thought as an individual. It is a fact that dogmatic religion, the fixed dogmas of the religious confessions, will kill the religious life of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. So that a fresh start from this age must consist in making it clear that in the first centuries of the Christian era this or that may have been adapted to man's development at the time, and that in the following centuries something different is needed. Also that there are different religions. We must try to make the essential nature of the different religions intelligible, to make clear different aspects of the Christ-conception. In this way we bring to every soul what it requires for its particular deepening. But we do not ourselves intervene in the moulding of the soul; we leave the soul, especially in the sphere of religion, its own liberty of thinking and scope to unfold this liberty.

...
So we find the clash of sharp conflict between germinating liberty of thought and the principle of authority which works into our times like a hang-over from the past. And there is a passion for dulling the consciousness and for self-deception where belief in authority is concerned. In our time putting faith in authority has become so great and so intensified that under its influence people are losing their power of judgment. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch they were endowed by nature with sound understanding; now they must acquire it, develop it, and their belief in authority holds them back from doing so. We are becoming bound hand and foot to our belief in authority. Only think how helpless human beings appear when compared to the unreasoning animal creation! How completely the animal is guided by instincts which lead it in a sound way even from sickness back to health; whereas modern man fights against sound judgment in this respect and submits himself entirely to authority. He has very little wish to acquire discernment for healthy conditions of living, although it is true that praiseworthy efforts are made in this direction by various societies and institutions. But these efforts need to be very much intensified; above all we must realise that we have increasingly to contend with our own trust in authority, and that whole theories are being built up which in their turn will become the basis of convictions only serving to uphold belief in authority.

In medicine, in law and in every other sphere people declare themselves from the outset incompetent to judge, and accept what science tells them. The complications of modern life make this understandable. But under the pressure of authority we shall become more and more helpless. And systematically to build up this force of authority, this habit of authority, is actually the principle of Jesuitism. And Jesuitism in the Catholic religion is only a special instance of other less noticeable performances in other directions. It begins in the sphere of ecclesiastical dogma with the tendency to uphold papal authority projected over from the fourth post-Atlantean period into the fifth where it can do no good. But the same Jesuitical principle will gradually transfer itself to other spheres of life. In a form hardly differing from the Jesuitism of dogmatic religion, we already find it in medical circles where a certain dogmatism strives after more power for the medical profession. This is typical of Jesuitical aspiration everywhere; and it will grow stronger and stronger. People will find themselves more and more tied down by what authority imposes upon them. 

Except Steiner doesn't only criticize dogmatic thinking but also illustrates methods to us by which we can liberate ourselves from dogma of all sorts, secular and religious, and start swimming with our thinking to the Center of the pool, where our innermost individuality can shine through our spiritual activity. Then we are not only on a path to liberation from the dogma which serves to justify our lower conditioning, but on a path of liberating the Christ within from that dogmatic conditioning as well.