Federica wrote: ↑Thu Feb 09, 2023 12:32 pm
I do have difficulties with texts, while knowing that if I persist the situation will evolve, but I think Eugene was referring to the following thing I wrote a few days ago, so I believe he was not misconstructing:
Federica wrote: ↑Tue Jan 31, 2023 10:07 am
One can agree with what Eugene said that, sadly, many would shy away from, or stumble upon, a book like PoF. From my recent experience I can say that I have not succeeded once in the few attempts I've made to get another person to read anything av Steiner.
Regardless, what you have written in this post seems to me like a luminous concentrate of time-wisdom! It achieves the seemingly impossible, by
making things not only evident, but
self-evident.
Thanks for the clarification, Federica. I suppose the key point is that, regardless of what happens within our personal sphere of pointing towards the Wisdom in any given texts, we know this has no bearing on the reality and capacity of our Earthly spiritual evolution. Not because of blind hope or faith, but because we can carefully reason out how evolutionary change unfolds in all domains of experience, including our own progression from childhood onwards. This key point is also in PoF:
Evolution is understood to mean the real development of the later out of the earlier in accordance with natural law. In the organic world, evolution is understood to mean that the later (more perfect) organic forms are real descendants of the earlier (imperfect) forms, and have developed from them in accordance with natural laws. The adherents of the theory of organic evolution ought really to picture to themselves that there was once a time on our earth when a being could have followed with his own eyes the gradual development of reptiles out of proto-amniotes, had he been able to be there at the time as an observer, endowed with a sufficiently long span of life. Similarly, evolutionists ought to picture to themselves that a being could have watched the development of the solar system out of the Kant-Laplace primordial nebula, had he been able to remain in a suitable spot out in the cosmic world ether during that infinitely long time. That with such mental pictures, the nature of both the proto-amniotes and the Kant-Laplace cosmic nebula would have to be thought of differently from the way the materialist thinkers do, is here irrelevant. But no evolutionist should ever dream of maintaining that he could get the concept of the reptile, with all its characteristics, out of his concept of the proto-amniotic animal, if he had never seen a reptile. Just as little would it be possible to derive the solar system from the concept of the Kant-Laplace nebula, if this concept of a primordial nebula is thought of as being directly determined only by the percept of the primordial nebula. In other words, if the evolutionist is to think consistently, he is bound to maintain that later phases of evolution do actually result from earlier ones, and that once we have been given the concept of the imperfect and that of the perfect, we can see the connection; but on no account should he agree that the concept attained from the earlier is, in itself, sufficient for evolving the later out of it. From this it follows for ethics that, though we can certainly see the connection between later moral concepts and earlier, we cannot get even a single new moral idea out of the earlier ones.
As you probably know, Steiner really anticipated how spiritual science would flow out into the world, as also evidenced in many of his lectures. So we only need sound judgment to discern that metamorphoses on Earth always arrive from the spectrum of 'future' potential (spirit worlds), and what we perceive in nature and culture right now, at any given moment, is the afterglow of
already accomplished intents. Even with ordinary reasoning, we can decondition from this past-oriented fixation by taking the more macroscopic view of evolutionary arcs. We can discern that its not so much the content of the forms we see around us which is relevant, fixed in space and time, but the supra-sensory skills/forces which are latent in those forms and which have worked and will continue to work across many epochs. Then we aren't so mentally attached to only the outward-facing events and consequences which unfold in months and years, which no one can deny are often troubling.
On another note, it is indeed diffiicult to get people motivated to put the inner effort towards that which is still unknown and unfamiliar to them, but when Karma brings such people along our path, such as yourself, it is a fantastically rewarding experience! I recently had my day brightened by this comment on another forum:
Thank you for pointing me to Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom. I needed extra perspectives to open it up for me (especially Deleuze's Difference & Repetition), but it holds wisdom that's hard to find anywhere else... Maybe QRI? Maybe process-relational stuff (Whitehead, Deleuze, Sloterdijk, Bard & Söderqvist)? But like ... in terms of readability and practicality, PoF is just a more sensible place to start. The second to last chapter, "The Value of Life (Optimism and Pessimism)" is maybe the only place I've seen someone make connections between desire and pleasure (e.g. D&R ch. II & V), willing and freedom (D&R ch. I & II), and ideas and ideals (D&R ch. I, IV, & V) in an accessible & usable way.