Meditation exercise on "separate me"

[AshvinP]

I have a more abstract philosophical thought here, which could be a helpful addition to the discussion. We can speak of the archetypal folds of evolution as polarities. There is the Saturn-Sun polarity, or in terms of bodies, the physical-etheric. There is also the Moon-Earth polarity, or astral-ego. Currently, in our Earthly stage of development, our I-consciousness is almost entirely within the astral body, subject to mostly alien passions and corresponding concepts. (to make it simpler, assume I am speaking of the least spiritually evolved people now). That is why we can say the path to spiritual freedom consists in aligning our personal will that of the archetypal Good, the Divine Will, so that our personal soul-life is purified and its aperture of interests is expanded more and more into spheres of higher potential becoming.

Once our will is so fully attuned to the Divine Will, as it will be on Jupiter, what becomes the expression of our spiritual freedom? Then our I-consciousness is acting through the higher Self, the Spirit Self, which is the purified and transmuted astral body. It is the Moon evolution redeemed-fulfilled, so we have again attenuated to a polar opposite mode of be-ing. That doesn't mean we are working in opposition to our Earth evolution, but we have realized the latter's fruits and are now consciously steering our stream of becoming as viewed from the spiritual pole rather than the physical-material pole. As Cleric indicates, then it makes sense to speak of the task of free I-beings as developing the art of how to manifest the Divine Will. Or as Heindel put it, more esoterically:

His power to form clear mental conceptions of colors, objects, or tones [on Jupiter] will enable him to contact and influence supersensuous beings of various orders and to secure their obedience, employing their forces as he wishes. He will be unable to send out from himself the forces wherewith to carry out his designs, however, and will be dependent upon the help of these superphysical beings, who will then be at his service.

So, when viewed from our perspective now, it does feel as if the expression of freedom becomes the polar opposite of what it is right now, based on our current stage of development. I think it mostly goes to show that we can't linearly extrapolate our current concepts, even of our highest ideals, into the future stages of evolution. In a sense, it is not essentially different from what should do now for our freedom, because when we work out problems to solve in nature and culture for our collective advancement, we are still unknowingly figuring out ways to manifest the Divine Will on the physical-etheric plane. Because it is unknowing, though, we cannot really speak of it as 'creative' or 'free'. But now we also lack the inspiration to work out such problems, instead choosing to either ignore them, hoping they will go away or be resolved by some external power, or only work on those which advance our personal well-being. Through meditative development, it becomes more clear to us how we are membered into the Divine Cosmos and what we are truly doing here with our spiritual activity, which builds the gradient between our free attunement to Earthly tasks and our free artistic rendering of the tasks on Jupiter.

This signifies that the nature of meditation is not something to attain but to achieve – an achievement by which man accomplishes himself. Modern meditation does not desire an entrance into a spiritual world antecedent to it, but rather freely gives itself the responsibility for the origin of a spiritual world, which can only arise out of man accomplishing himself in meditation as a world first. Modern meditation does not object to a desire for self-perfection for reasons that renunciation might expect an all the more richer welcome – but from the insight that neither desire nor renunciation can attain a real meditative content, since only the meditation itself can give this to the latter. This is not the loan that awaits it, but the gift that it offers to the world. Modern meditation is not the path into a pre-meditative world, but the formation of a new metamorphosis of the world. The nature of modern meditative experience is neither one of creaturely emerging from the creative powers of the world nor the dissolution therein, but the transformed emergence of creative spirituality from human self-formation. Meditation is the moral intuition of the human being, the moral imagination of the transmutation of the world process in man and the moral technique of freedom. Herein lies the difference to all previous forms of meditative life.

Thanks Ashvin, indeed, all the above speaks well to the contingent question I have been wondering about.

For my part, I think the underlying point can be made more clear. Instead of focusing on Earth and Jupiter, we could focus on our current incarnation and our next incarnation. Ultimately, we are speaking about spiraling the poles of physical life and spiritual life together. Here it is helpful to remember, "those who lose their lives for My sake, will find it." In other words, the best path to attaining our true heart's desires is the path of sacrifice and service to the Divine Will. People today fantasize about having all sorts of alternatives to choose from in life, from flavors of ice cream up to and including their biological gender, but they want these things with little sacrificial effort. What they don't realize is that the reality of what they dimly fantasize about can be attained through the sacrificial spiritual path. Of course this makes zero sense to most people because they haven't phenomenologically investigated the reality of ideas-thinking.

For those of us who have, we start the path of attainment by discovering the DoF in our psycho-spiritual life. To do this, we must begin transforming inwardly so that we voluntarily constrain our palette of outer choices, i.e. we give up the possibility of eating meat, drinking alcohol, staying up late and partying, etc. So far I think this is what you would call the 'anthroposophical idea of freedom', which is correct. But what is the result of this progression towards inner freedom through material-intellectual sacrifice? There are many, but one is that we gain greater consciousness of the higher worlds and their higher-order intents, thereby advancing our evolution between death-rebirth where we fashion our new vehicles for the next incarnation. Then, in the latter, we will have greater leeway in our thought-life, our soul-life, and our organic structure. So we will actually attain a greater palette of alternative possibilities to choose from in manifesting our Divinely-willed destiny in the next incarnation.

In that way, the poles spiral together and inner freedom from outer attachments feeds back into the freedom to manifest our creative capacities outwardly. "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." This process continually feeds back until the individuated soul-life has been perfected and the reincarnation cycle itself ends, i.e. continuity of consciousness, and then the Earth evolution is fulfilled.

[Federica]

For my part, I think the underlying point can be made more clear. Instead of focusing on Earth and Jupiter, we could focus on our current incarnation and our next incarnation. Ultimately, we are speaking about spiraling the poles of physical life and spiritual life together. Here it is helpful to remember, "those who lose their lives for My sake, will find it." In other words, the best path to attaining our true heart's desires is the path of sacrifice and service to the Divine Will. People today fantasize about having all sorts of alternatives to choose from in life, from flavors of ice cream up to and including their biological gender, but they want these things with little sacrificial effort. What they don't realize is that the reality of what they dimly fantasize about can be attained through the sacrificial spiritual path. Of course this makes zero sense to most people because they haven't phenomenologically investigated the reality of ideas-thinking.

For those of us who have, we start the path of attainment by discovering the DoF in our psycho-spiritual life. To do this, we must begin transforming inwardly so that we voluntarily constrain our palette of outer choices, i.e. we give up the possibility of eating meat, drinking alcohol, staying up late and partying, etc. So far I think this is what you would call the 'anthroposophical idea of freedom', which is correct. But what is the result of this progression towards inner freedom through material-intellectual sacrifice? There are many, but one is that we gain greater consciousness of the higher worlds and their higher-order intents, thereby advancing our evolution between death-rebirth where we fashion our new vehicles for the next incarnation. Then, in the latter, we will have greater leeway in our thought-life, our soul-life, and our organic structure. So we will actually attain a greater palette of alternative possibilities to choose from in manifesting our Divinely-willed destiny in the next incarnation.

In that way, the poles spiral together and inner freedom from outer attachments feeds back into the freedom to manifest our creative capacities outwardly. "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." This process continually feeds back until the individuated soul-life has been perfected and the reincarnation cycle itself ends, i.e. continuity of consciousness, and then the Earth evolution is fulfilled.

*******

People today fantasize about having all sorts of alternatives to choose from in life, from flavors of ice cream up to and including their biological gender, but they want these things with little sacrificial effort. What they don't realize is that the reality of what they dimly fantasize about can be attained through the sacrificial spiritual path. Of course this makes zero sense to most people because they haven't phenomenologically investigated the reality of ideas-thinking.

Well, I’d say, a majority of people can easily conceive the idea of working hard, which is a kind of sacrifice, in order to obtain some results. So it’s not about their unwillingness to understand sacrifice, as much as it is the altitude, and quality, of the future attractor for those sacrifices, that they set sail for.

we voluntarily constrain our palette of outer choices, i.e. we give up the possibility of eating meat, drinking alcohol, staying up late and partying, etc. So far I think this is what you would call the 'anthroposophical idea of freedom', which is correct.

I never thought about it in these terms, but it’s true, we sacrifice some pleasurable actions, because we can now better assess from where they arise, how they work on us, and where they will bring us. It’s all about what desired outcome we set sail for and what course of action this outcome, or ideal, invites. It’s about the future attractor. When I consider the act of having a mojito, for example, where it can bring me, and what desired outcomes it would help me secure, it becomes clear that it can make sense for a certain range of desired goals, but it falls completely outside the cone of attraction of the goals I am now discovering. So the more I let the new future attractor be known and understood and embodied, in living way, including physically, the more the goal will materialize in me in all its practical aspects too, which will make clear, and real, that having a mojito, as an action-step, would push me outside the cone of attraction of my new goals.

But that’s not what I was calling the anthroposophical idea of freedom in this thread. I think I put it explicitly in this post. So I was rather referring to PoF Chapter IX and to Max Leyf’s essay the idea of freedom I linked before. As I said:

In Steiner (PoF) when we follow in action our individual moral intuition, our willed activity is free not because we had the possibility to alternatively act impulsively and follow our lower instincts, for example, or an egoistic motive, and err, but because we could find solely within ourselves the drive and the goal towards a certain course of action, by attaining to objective ideal reality and letting the purely ideal content interfere with our unique context and individuality, in order to formulate our intents, and will them.

we gain greater consciousness of the higher worlds and their higher-order intents, thereby advancing our evolution between death-rebirth where we fashion our new vehicles for the next incarnation. Then, in the latter, we will have greater leeway in our thought-life, our soul-life, and our organic structure. So we will actually attain a greater palette of alternative possibilities to choose from in manifesting our Divinely-willed destiny in the next incarnation.

Greater consciousness of the higher worlds and intents, for sure, but it’s less sure we will gain a greater palette of alternative possibilities to choose from. If you think about it, we will transform, gaining some possibilities, and losing some other ones. For example, we will maybe have a less sexualized physical body in our next earthly incarnation.
And this illustrates the point I was trying to make: how many alternative options to choose from we will have, is not relevant, it has no impact on how much freedom we’ll be able to express! On the contrary, our greater consciousness of higher intents will clarify our desires more, their cone of attraction from the future, thus our chances to operate in freedom.

In that way, the poles spiral together and inner freedom from outer attachments feeds back into the freedom to manifest our creative capacities outwardly.

Yes, but not through the fact that we will have any “greater palette” of alternatives. But I feel you have not expressed your thoughts entirely, Ashvin. Please go ahead…

[AshvinP]

For my part, I think the underlying point can be made more clear. Instead of focusing on Earth and Jupiter, we could focus on our current incarnation and our next incarnation. Ultimately, we are speaking about spiraling the poles of physical life and spiritual life together. Here it is helpful to remember, "those who lose their lives for My sake, will find it." In other words, the best path to attaining our true heart's desires is the path of sacrifice and service to the Divine Will. People today fantasize about having all sorts of alternatives to choose from in life, from flavors of ice cream up to and including their biological gender, but they want these things with little sacrificial effort. What they don't realize is that the reality of what they dimly fantasize about can be attained through the sacrificial spiritual path. Of course this makes zero sense to most people because they haven't phenomenologically investigated the reality of ideas-thinking.

For those of us who have, we start the path of attainment by discovering the DoF in our psycho-spiritual life. To do this, we must begin transforming inwardly so that we voluntarily constrain our palette of outer choices, i.e. we give up the possibility of eating meat, drinking alcohol, staying up late and partying, etc. So far I think this is what you would call the 'anthroposophical idea of freedom', which is correct. But what is the result of this progression towards inner freedom through material-intellectual sacrifice? There are many, but one is that we gain greater consciousness of the higher worlds and their higher-order intents, thereby advancing our evolution between death-rebirth where we fashion our new vehicles for the next incarnation. Then, in the latter, we will have greater leeway in our thought-life, our soul-life, and our organic structure. So we will actually attain a greater palette of alternative possibilities to choose from in manifesting our Divinely-willed destiny in the next incarnation.

In that way, the poles spiral together and inner freedom from outer attachments feeds back into the freedom to manifest our creative capacities outwardly. "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." This process continually feeds back until the individuated soul-life has been perfected and the reincarnation cycle itself ends, i.e. continuity of consciousness, and then the Earth evolution is fulfilled.

*******

People today fantasize about having all sorts of alternatives to choose from in life, from flavors of ice cream up to and including their biological gender, but they want these things with little sacrificial effort. What they don't realize is that the reality of what they dimly fantasize about can be attained through the sacrificial spiritual path. Of course this makes zero sense to most people because they haven't phenomenologically investigated the reality of ideas-thinking.

Well, I’d say, a majority of people can easily conceive the idea of working hard, which is a kind of sacrifice, in order to obtain some results. So it’s not about their unwillingness to understand sacrifice, as much as it is the altitude, and quality, of the future attractor for those sacrifices, that they set sail for.

It's not about holding a conception of sacrifice, or exerting physical time/energy, but about walking the path of inner sacrifice where the layers of personality are progressively unfolded. Yes, the attractor ideals are critical, but so are the concrete embodiment of those ideals in our lives. An account of spiritual freedom should keep both in view. (I see now you mention this below as well)

we voluntarily constrain our palette of outer choices, i.e. we give up the possibility of eating meat, drinking alcohol, staying up late and partying, etc. So far I think this is what you would call the 'anthroposophical idea of freedom', which is correct.

I never thought about it in these terms, but it’s true, we sacrifice some pleasurable actions, because we can now better assess from where they arise, how they work on us, and where they will bring us. It’s all about what desired outcome we set sail for and what course of action this outcome, or ideal, invites. It’s about the future attractor. When I consider the act of having a mojito, for example, where it can bring me, and what desired outcomes it would help me secure, it becomes clear that it can make sense for a certain range of desired goals, but it falls completely outside the cone of attraction of the goals I am now discovering. So the more I let the new future attractor be known and understood and embodied, in living way, including physically, the more the goal will materialize in me in all its practical aspects too, which will make clear, and real, that having a mojito, as an action-step, would push me outside the cone of attraction of my new goals.

We are on the same page here, except I don't know why this understanding is not central to the 'anthroposophical idea of freedom'.

But that’s not what I was calling the anthroposophical idea of freedom in this thread. I think I put it explicitly in this post. So I was rather referring to PoF Chapter IX and to Max Leyf’s essay the idea of freedom I linked before. As I said:

In Steiner (PoF) when we follow in action our individual moral intuition, our willed activity is free not because we had the possibility to alternatively act impulsively and follow our lower instincts, for example, or an egoistic motive, and err, but because we could find solely within ourselves the drive and the goal towards a certain course of action, by attaining to objective ideal reality and letting the purely ideal content interfere with our unique context and individuality, in order to formulate our intents, and will them.

I would point out here that freedom in our current stage should encompass the bold as well. Anthroposophy speaks a good deal about the black magicians who, despite attaining to objective ideal reality i.e. the reality of spiritual beings and their concrete influences in phenomenal processes of body-soul-spirit, choose to follow lower impulses and use that knowledge to formulate egoistic aims at cross-purposes with the Divine Will. If that were not a possibility for us, then we would not be truly free.

we gain greater consciousness of the higher worlds and their higher-order intents, thereby advancing our evolution between death-rebirth where we fashion our new vehicles for the next incarnation. Then, in the latter, we will have greater leeway in our thought-life, our soul-life, and our organic structure. So we will actually attain a greater palette of alternative possibilities to choose from in manifesting our Divinely-willed destiny in the next incarnation.

Greater consciousness of the higher worlds and intents, for sure, but it’s less sure we will gain a greater palette of alternative possibilities to choose from. If you think about it, we will transform, gaining some possibilities, and losing some other ones. For example, we will maybe have a less sexualized physical body in our next earthly incarnation.
And this illustrates the point I was trying to make: how many alternative options to choose from we will have, is not relevant, it has no impact on how much freedom we’ll be able to express! On the contrary, our greater consciousness of higher intents will clarify our desires more, their cone of attraction from the future, thus our chances to operate in freedom.

In that way, the poles spiral together and inner freedom from outer attachments feeds back into the freedom to manifest our creative capacities outwardly.

Yes, but not through the fact that we will have any “greater palette” of alternatives. But I feel you have not expressed your thoughts entirely, Ashvin. Please go ahead…

Overall, I don't see how we can grow into the higher spheres of potential and simply trade off possibilities for manifesting the Spirit. Certainly the nature of that manifestation will transform radically from what we are now used to, but it will generally expand to encompass more and more creative responsibility for the spheres of culture and nature as the previously responsible Divinities withdraw from that activity. For ex. I will remind of this quote:

If in the light of this we study the first verse, “In the very beginning was the word,” we might represent the state of affairs pictorially by the following comparison. Before we utter a word, this word lives in us as thought. It lives within us. When the word is uttered the air around us is set in motion; vibrations are produced. If we imagine these vibrations condensed and hardened in some way, we should see the words fall to the ground as forms and figures; we should perceive the creative power of the word with our eyes. If the word is already creative now, it will be much more so in the future.

[Man's creative power: heart and larynx]

Man already possesses organs which will only attain their full significance in the future; he also possesses others which are already in decline. To the latter belong the organs of reproduction, to the former the heart and the larynx, for these are only at the beginning of their development. At the present time the heart is an involuntary muscle, although it has transverse fibers like all voluntary muscles. These transverse fibers are an indication that the heart is in the process of transition from an involuntary to a voluntary organ. The larynx is destined to be the human organ of reproduction in a distant future, strange as this may sound at present. Just as Man, by means of speech, can already transpose his thoughts into vibrations of the air, he will in the future be able to create his own image by means of the word.

The 'Very Beginnings' already possessed this creative power at the outset of the evolution of our world and can therefore be rightly looked upon as divine Beings. At the beginning of the evolution of the Earth a divine Word was uttered, and this has become mineral, plant, animal and Man.

So, as we both mentioned above, the way in which we embody the high ideal attractors and the means through which we manifest them, is also critical to keep in view here. That is one leg of the unified rhythm which allows us to continue expanding and pursuing our cone of attraction. Steiner often mentions how what we do with our limb system in the current incarnation, i.e. the intents we creatively manifest, will generate the forces which go into the formation of our head system in the next incarnation, i.e. the tool we use to expand the cone of attraction. I'm not saying 'freedom' is only about one leg of the rhythm over the other, but should rather be understood as the process of perfecting the harmonious working of both legs. That is the heart of the Christ impulse which returned the capacity for humans to work out their own destiny as Lords of the Earth evolution, or the 10th hierarchy of 'Spirits of Love'.

[Cleric K]

Trying to finally come to an answer to your question - in which sense I am still searching for a better grasp of the reality of freedom for future man - I can say that I was looking for ways to make my intuition more specific, that the future attractor for man’s course of action - God’s will - would probably operate more flawlessly, more like a flow, more transparently, more warmly, on illuminating man’s will compared to how we discern it today. Maybe I was hoping that such intuition could shed some faraway, but significant light even now, on our present efforts to embody that same future ideal.

Thanks Federica, maybe I'm getting a better idea now.

What you suggest above will certainly come to pass. If I may express it thus, as we grow more and more into the spiritual world, it is as if our WFT receive more 'spiritual cushioning'. As an analogy we can think of the ground effect. The air displaced down by the wings or rotor is resisted by the ground and a kind of air cushion forms. Birds often utilize this effect when they fly very close to the ground or water because it takes them less energy.



In a certain sense every act of our spiritual activity agitates in some way the flow of becoming. At our present stage we're quite insensitive about the consequences of our actions. The most we can do is to intellectually predict them. With increasing sensitivity however, everything we do begins to feel as receiving subtle feedback and we can know whether we're near a wall. Steiner mentions the following:

There will be people — at first only a few, for only in the course of the next two or three thousand years will these capacities evolve in larger numbers, and these first forerunners will be born before the end of the first half of the twentieth century — who will have an experience something like the following. After taking part in some action they will withdraw from it, and will have before them a picture which arises from the act in question. At first, they will not recognise it; they will not find in it any relation to what they have done. In the end they will see that this picture, which appears to them as a sort of conscious dream-picture, is the counterpart of their own action; it is the picture of the action which must take place, in order that the karmic compensation of the previous action may be brought about.

Thus we are approaching an age in which men will begin to understand karma not only from the teachings and presentations of Spiritual Science, but in which they will begin actually to see karma. Whereas until now karma was to man an obscure impulse, an obscure desire, which could be fulfilled only in the following life, which could only between death and a new birth be transformed into an intention, man will gradually evolve to a conscious perception of the work of Lucifer and its effect. Certainly only those will have this power of etheric clairvoyance who have striven after knowledge and self-knowledge. But even in normal circumstances men will have more and more before them the karmic pictures of their actions. That will carry them on further and further, because they will see what they still owe to the world — what is on the debit side of their karma. What prevents us from being free is that we do not know what we still owe and so we cannot really speak of free will in connection with karma. The expression ‘free will’ itself is incorrect, for man only becomes free through ever-increasing knowledge, through rising higher and higher and growing more and more into the spiritual world. By so doing he fills himself with the contents of the spiritual world, and becomes in greater degree the director of his own will. It is not the will which becomes free, but man who permeates himself with what he can know and see in the spiritualised domain of the world.

So in this way indeed our flow should become more fluid, more harmonious and heart-warm. And as always, we should remember that this cushioning feedback is not merely a mechanical effect but living relations with beings. Thus the cushioning is almost as if we can always receive subtle support "For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone."

If we take all this one-sidedly we may get the impression that the more we evolve, the more we simply flow along a one-way cushioned gradient. Would you say that this could be at the root of your question? What is freedom if our stream of becoming is cushioned from all sides and we can simply flow through the gradient of highest efficiency?

[Federica]

(...)

*******

We are on the same page here, except I don't know why this understanding is not central to the 'anthroposophical idea of freedom'.

It is definitely central, for my individual perspective! I said “that’s not what I was calling the anthroposophical idea of freedom in this thread” to signify that I don’t think I can use myself as a valid example of what freedom is, when I’m trying to argue my points in contrast to what Cleric, and now you, are expressing. I aspire to freedom, but I am not free. So in this thread, I have referred to other sources than my own beginner steps, in support of what I am trying to say about freedom.

I would point out here that freedom in our current stage should encompass the bold as well [the possibility to alternatively act impulsively and follow our lower instincts, for example, or an egoistic motive, and err]

I disagree! And that’s the crux of the matter, that I have been trying to discuss - fruitlessly - in this thread. Thank you for at least being ready to discuss it. Basically you are saying: resisting temptations is part of what makes us free. I say: no. Only knowledge and truth make us free. When we make contact with them, tempting actions will not be tempting anymore. It’s not by resisting temptations that we learn the Truth. It’s by learning the Truth that temptations cease to exert pull on us. What’s encapsulated in the inner side of a temptation is… more temptation, if we are weak, or absolutely nothing if we are strong. It’s not by closely exploring its contours, looking into its hole, and appreciating its 'call' that we get closer to Truth. If we attempt that, one of two possible things will happen. Either we are not ready, and we will succumb to the ‘call’, or we are in the first place ready, and such exploration loses any relevance and substance. Freedom is not expressed by turning temptation inside out, trying to win over it and ‘kill it’. Unless we are too weak and get eaten by it, we would be left with nothing in our hands.

The fruit of knowledge and wisdom is not hanging on the inside of a tempting action! Rather, it’s the fruit of knowledge and wisdom that has the power to expose the inside of a tempting action, thereby devoiding it completely of its momentum. What you are saying is like saying that you only can know that your garden is green, once you see your neighbor's messy flowerbeds. Why would you need to compare your-self who is aiming for Truth, Love and Wisdom, to a suppositious version of yourself that could have stumbled upon temptation, could have fallen into it, in order to realize that you are freely progressing on the path? How can the Christ impulse be understood by the principle of comparison!?


If we have attained and achieved knowledge, we will fear no evil and no black magic. The possibility to err is scary as long as we lack sufficient contact with knowledge and truth, and freedom means establishing that contact. Such contact is not more valuable the more possibilities to err are around. Rather, the possibilities to err are part of reality and are understood parallel to everything else universal. Knowledge of reality is one, and when we have made ourselves one with it, we have become free. Freedom is found in the understanding - that is, acquisition, embodiment - of Love, Truth and Wisdom that inform moral desires. It manifests as our individual expression in the process of translating the one knowledge into individualized desires, contingent on our unique context. In other words, freedom is experienced when we produce moral intuitions. Moral intuition is our free way to ‘refract out’ the one knowledge as applications, in the world, through the prism of our individuality. Once the moral intuition is gained, our freedom has found its full expression.
The highest form of willed individual action - and thereby the only one that is completely free - is, as Steiner said, “an action determined purely and simply by its own ideal content”. Then, it remains to energize its unfolding, keeping the will focused and the execution sharp, so that we don’t get sidetracked by lack of implementing skills. But that’s a 'downhill' section of the path. Freedom has already come to full expression, for that course of action.

Only when I follow my love for my objective is it I myself who acts. I act, at this level of morality, not because I acknowledge a lord over me, or an external authority, or a so-called inner voice; I acknowledge no external principle for my action, because I have found in myself the ground for my action, namely, my love of the action. I do not work out mentally whether my action is good or bad; I carry it out because I love it. My action will be “good” if my intuition, steeped in love, finds its right place within the intuitively experienceable world continuum; it will be “bad” if this is not the case.

Overall, I don't see how we can grow into the higher spheres of potential and simply trade off possibilities for manifesting the Spirit. Certainly the nature of that manifestation will transform radically from what we are now used to, but it will generally expand

I’m not saying we will simply trade off possibilities. I don’t know how exactly we will grow into the higher spheres. This being said, I think we should refrain from thinking in terms of “greater palette”. There’s an underlying idea of ‘gearing up the control tower’ that seems misleading to me. Super-powers (that we can only name as such by comparison to our current organization) will probably meet super-responsibilities that will probably dissolve any sense of greater palette.



Ultimately, I would answer your evil option to err that we need in order to be truly free, with Steiner [the brackets are mine]:

To regard evil, the deed of a criminal [or our resistance to it], as an expression of the human individuality [freedom] in the same sense [the other leg, as you call it] as one regards the embodiment of pure intuition is only possible if blind instincts are reckoned as part of the human individuality. But the blind instinct that drives a man to crime does not spring from intuition, and does not belong to what is individual in him, but rather to what is most general in him, to what is equally present in all individuals and out of which a man works his way by means of what is individual in him. [resistence to what is most general in us is only a consequence of freedom, not a building block of freedom]
(...)
An action is felt to be free in so far as the reasons for it spring from the ideal part of my individual being; every other part of an action, irrespective of whether it is carried out under the compulsion of nature or under the obligation of a moral standard, is felt to be unfree.

[Federica]

If we take all this one-sidedly we may get the impression that the more we evolve, the more we simply flow along a one-way cushioned gradient. Would you say that this could be at the root of your question? What is freedom if our stream of becoming is cushioned from all sides and we can simply flow through the gradient of highest efficiency?

No, I wouldn’t say that at all.
Cleric, I am finding myself at a loss how to read your replies. Who could possibly imagine that, because you have now added the cushions, I would now align with the same interpretation of my question you made here

If I understand your initial question, it has to do with "What place there's for freedom if we fully submit to the will of God?" This one of the most common objections because it seems to be the total opposite of freedom. How can we be free if we're a slave to the will of God?

which I repeatedly pushed back? This is the third time! Could you please help me understand: where did I even remotely indicate that my question is: “What is freedom if our stream of becoming is cushioned from all sides“?
I know there will be cushions. That was my initial intuition, my starting point. My question has never been “how can I be free with cushions all around”. Instead, I have wondered about “the reality of freedom for future man” as a means to illuminate “our present efforts to embody that same future ideal”.
Maybe it's your vision of freedom as possibility to err, that triggers these misinterpretations? I don’t get this vision, as I have tried to illustrate both to you, and in my last replies to Ashvin, as well. I realize you don’t want to discuss that. I respect it. The only reason I developed my thoughts in my last reply, is because you said that you were open to discuss it. We certainly don’t have to, but why do you insist that I must be worried about becoming a slave to the will of God?

[AshvinP]

Federica,

I have many thoughts on the points made in your latest response, and I hope to circle back on some of those. For now, I would like to focus on the point below. I can see there are clearly some discrepancies between us on this question of freedom, but I am not sure exactly from where they arise. Clearly we both take our start from PoF and what you quoted from Steiner.

The original question on this thread was how the path of cognitive freedom expresses itself during the course of human evolution, as far out as the Jupiter aeon. How can we concretely relate our current stream of becoming through higher cognitive activity to that which we will embody in ages to come? In such a context, we are going from the PoF-level discussion to a deeper view of how the process of making the 'World content our own Thought content' plays out in practical terms. In that process, I think we really need to resist the temptation to search only for a broad definition of 'freedom' which, in a single sweep, encompasses all of its many-sided facets. Instead, we can try to discern how various facets of our freedom come to expression in different ways, depending on the context. So, with that in mind, returning to the point below:

Overall, I don't see how we can grow into the higher spheres of potential and simply trade off possibilities for manifesting the Spirit. Certainly the nature of that manifestation will transform radically from what we are now used to, but it will generally expand

I’m not saying we will simply trade off possibilities. I don’t know how exactly we will grow into the higher spheres. This being said, I think we should refrain from thinking in terms of “greater palette”. There’s an underlying idea of ‘gearing up the control tower’ that seems misleading to me. Super-powers (that we can only name as such by comparison to our current organization) will probably meet super-responsibilities that will probably dissolve any sense of greater palette.

Your response above already contains the reason why the objection doesn't hold. Considering the expansion of the palette of pathways through which we can manifest our high ideals, a critical facet of our free-ing spiritual activity, is only objectionable if we caricature it into the superficial understanding of gaining superpowers. It's as if we imagine the advanced initiate or the Angelic being thinking, 'wow I have gained the capacity to participate in shaping the destiny of the Cosmic organism by forming images in the astral bodies of these lower beings... this is amazing!' But as you correctly point out, that ignores the fact we are inwardly transforming at the same time that we grow into the higher spheres of potential. Our entire understanding of who we are and how we exist in the Cosmic context is changing, as we grow into new creative responsibilities with every higher step we take.

So if we resist the urge to caricature it in that way, then we have a clear intuitive sense of the expanding pallette, even if we don't know all the intricate details yet. Our expanding pallette will form the environmental basis for the spiritual evolution of lower life waves who have yet to go through their 'human' stage. That is integral to what it means to take on greater creative responsibility in correspondence with our increasing freedom, or put another way, the two cannot be properly understood in isolation from each other. At this point, I want to stop and ask whether this reformulation has greater resonance for you with the 'greater pallette' facet of freedom? Ultimately, it is all expression of our 'I'-dentity with the Divine Origin, and increasing living knowledge of that alone makes us free, but if we want a deeper view of how that concretely manifests in our stream of becoming over ages to come, or I would argue even over the course of two incarnations, I think we need to explore these other facets.

[Federica]

Federica,

I have many thoughts on the points made in your latest response, and I hope to circle back on some of those. For now, I would like to focus on the point below.

You… hope to circle back?? How can you unabashedly ignore the crux of the matter in this way, and instead make your reply about a completely marginal point…
Is this a code of silence on the question of freedom?? Or to what do I owe this slap in the face? You know, Ashvin, it’s completely your right to refuse to discuss freedom, all of a sudden, and decide that you “would like” to discuss palettes. And it’s also your right to remain silent on the reasons for this volte-face. But I’m sorry, I’m not gonna talk palettes with you now (with a single l) because if there is a right you certainly do NOT have, is the one to make me play a game in this way.

[AshvinP]

Federica,

I have many thoughts on the points made in your latest response, and I hope to circle back on some of those. For now, I would like to focus on the point below.

You… hope to circle back?? How can you unabashedly ignore the crux of the matter in this way, and instead make your reply about a completely marginal point…
Is this a code of silence on the question of freedom?? Or to what do I owe this slap in the face? You know, Ashvin, it’s completely your right to refuse to discuss freedom, all of a sudden, and decide that you “would like” to discuss palettes. And it’s also your right to remain silent on the reasons for this volte-face. But I’m sorry, I’m not gonna talk palettes with you now (with a single l) because if there is a right you certainly do NOT have, is the one to make me play a game in this way.

OK, Federica. I did really hope to circle back, after focusing on an issue where you expressed a vague antipathy to 'superpowers' so as to clarify what is underlying it, which could certainly be relevant to the entire discussion. The pole of the 'expanding palette' is not marginal to the issue of freedom, in my view, but critical to understanding the facet of freedom we often call 'creative responsibility'. 

I had already written a substantial portion of a reply to the other parts of your post. Here is most of that reply re: the possibility of error or temptation.

Certainly I never meant to suggest that to be in error, or to succumb to temptation, is something which should be experienced as 'scary' on the higher cognitive path (although it should be taken with solemnity, which I would say mitigates its 'scariness'). In fact, we gain the greatest insights from our inevitable errors and temptations on this path, especially when they get the better of our higher nature and we are willing to honestly confront them and recognize the depth of their influence. Without that resistance, we could never learn, grow, mature, and perfect ourselves in freedom. Our evolving cognition allows us to view with gratitude all that which would otherwise confront us as scary, threatening, breeding contempt, etc.

On my own path, even in the initial stages, it is clear to me that only living, heartfelt knowledge of reality, born from within, carries the power to attune my will to that of the Cosmos so I don't continually wander off the reservation. I also notice how, at every stage of development, we are faced with the temptation to idolize what we have attained and continue expressing our freedom at that level. "Do not stop on any step, no matter how high, or it will become a snare." That temptation arises exactly because each new stage of free spiritual activity comes with a corresponding degree of creative responsibility for exercising that spiritual activity. We must progressively take over responsibility for those functions of our psycho-physical organism which were previously managed for us by the Divinities, and eventually the functions for the whole Earth.

When this is experienced in its depth of reality (not only as a concept or theory), it should be immediately apparent why the temptation is so strong to neglect or abandon the path of ascension. It starts to dawn on us how we are all, in truth, responsible for redeeming the 'sins of the world'. Through the Christ force of Wisdom and Love, we can endure this responsibility as it unfolds. The choice to neglect the responsibility is always there, but the attendant suffering-pain which accompanies such a choice, at the physiological, psychic, and spiritual level, also increases in lockstep. That is the power of self-consciousness or self-knowledge. To err or to neglect or to succumb to temptation is not to be equated with 'evil', unless it becomes a habitual way of life which simply refuses to learn and grow, adapting itself to new currents of spiritual evolution which arrive from orthogonal (unsuspected) directions.

Now there are Spirits of Wisdom active on the sun who have gone through their complete normal process of evolution; they work, as has been described, astrally upon the mineral. But certain of the Spirits of Wisdom have become Luciferic. We have designated this “becoming Luciferic” of certain spiritual beings of a hierarchy, as a sort of rebellion in the cosmos. This rebellion comes about because certain spirits having reached a given stage in their hierarchy, resist their brethren and work against them; work in an opposite direction. This opposition comes about simply because they do not wish to go through the evolution which the others do; so they simply remain behind at an earlier stage, just as we know in our own souls that we wish to progress, yet the ideas and habits we have acquired Will not allow us to do so because they wish to remain as a permanence. Our habits are often rebels against what we have acquired in a new epoch of life. In like manner the spiritual beings who remain behind at an earlier stage are rebels in the Cosmos. The Luciferic Spirits, the Spirits of Wisdom of the Second Hierarchy who have not gone through their development with the rest — instead of sending astral streams from the sun to the mineral, send etheric streams to the earth. This resulted in a certain basic substance being formed, which received its inner-being, not from the planets but directly from the sun; and this mineral is gold.

The above indicates every category of the hierarchies has spirits who have deviated from the Divine plan due to habitual rebellion, and that possibility is the basis for our freedom at its current stage. We need to thoroughly confront this deep aspect of our human nature to also shed light on the nature of our freedom. That is why Steiner always remarks we can't understand the Christ impulse by avoiding Lucifer-Ahriman, but by thoroughly and inwardly understanding their influences. To be clear, our experience of error or temptation should not be projected up into the spirit worlds. What we experience as those things when expressed in the fourth Earthly convolution is something of a vastly different nature when expressed in the higher worlds. But, at the same time, our failure to comprehend that higher expression should not cause us to reach premature judgments as to the absolute nature of 'freedom' and to marginalize all facets which don't seem to immediately fit into those judgments. That's why I wrote in the previous post:

In that process, I think we really need to resist the temptation to search only for a broad definition of 'freedom' which, in a single sweep, encompasses all of its many-sided facets. Instead, we can try to discern how various facets of our freedom come to expression in different ways, depending on the context. 

[Cleric K]

Federica,

What Ashvin has pointed out above is key - we can't speak of freedom without the opposing forces of evolution. In a certain sense this is the Divine Technique through which the Cosmic potential is explored. Our Earthly existence becomes possible only because the Imaginative world becomes more and more frictious, more resisting to our spiritual activity. This forces us to 'micro-manage' our Imaginative stream of becoming. This is really the origin of the sensory world, which we'll hopefully address further on the other thread. This is also the basis for the experience of freedom because by understanding the dynamics of this decohered flow, we develop the degrees of freedom through which we do the micro-management. The goal of course is to spiritualize the decohered flow once again by developing the higher order spiritual activities within which the micro-flow would have to be musically embedded. Without this descend (involution) our existence would resemble an Imaginative safari, where we behold pictures that are harmoniously ordered and nothing will ever force us to experience the manifoldness of the world and its micro-management to such an extent.

Now one can ask: but what's the point of all this since after we evolve towards the more harmonic stages it will be all the same whether or not we have gone through the deep involution? But this is not so. The fact that today we're forced to micro-manage our existence makes us into a quite special kind of spiritual beings. Maybe we all know some of those people who seem to always try to get to the 'bottom of things'. For example, they are not satisfied to only know that they use a computer - they want to understand how it works. Or they are not content with the fact that they have a body - they want to know about its organs, how they work and so on. They don't want to do business just to get the profit - they want to understand how this business fits in the global economic flow. This is really the kind of being that our evolutionary scenario produces. Through the harsh experiences in the frictious sensory world, we're forced to get to the bottom of things. Initially we need this purely for survival but as we develop this turns out to make us into beings that have unprecedentedly deep and rich experience of reality. This is something that will make its way into the future man too. Even in the higher worlds we'll continue to have this manifold experience of reality. It is as if we're trained to seek the depth in everything, to get to the bottom of things.

In contrast, we can imagine a kind of evolution, where we go through a completely blissful, angelic scenario. We'll be flowing with the oneness at every step, as a magnificent totality. But it is only through our Earthly evolution that we attain the spiritual forces of deeper scrutiny through which experience reality in a much more differentiated ways and we feel ourselves capable of navigating that reality in very unique ways. We can put that in a picture. We can imagine the angelic evolution as cushioned movement on ice where we go through smooth curves. Our Earthly evolution equips us with shoes with very fine spikes (these are really the result of the intellectual thoughts) through which we can have a grip on the ice and move in very fine-grained ways. We have much greater control, we can stop, change direction, look around, continue - these are degrees of freedom which are simply not there if we were to follow the more blissful evolution following smooth curves on the ice. This of course is a double-edged sword because we should still follow the general smooth paths, except that we have to do it consciously out of our understanding. We can afford some wiggle room with our fine-grained control, through which we experience reality in its unprecedented manifoldness but it is our responsibility to follow the general curvature. If we neglect that, we can deviate into more hairy situations. This is the price of freedom.

It's important to understand this. In the same way as when we discuss the fallacies of modern nondualism, here again we can say that not every evolutionary scenario leads to the same kind of experience of the living Cosmos. The fact that we're in the spiritual world doesn't mean that we behold something which is experienced in the same way by every being. As a totality - yes. But the resolution and details that we're forced as humans to develop will similarly make us experience also the spiritual world in a much more differentiated way, which in turn gives unique creative opportunities for the next waves of evolution.

Now going back to the general picture, I think that when we speak of freedom, like with everything else, here too we have to consider a polarity. On one hand we can speak of 'freedom from'. This I believe is the pole you've been more engaged with here. It's the freedom from desires, temptations, etc. through self-knowledge and perfecting the virtues. But this is connected also with the other pole 'freedom to'. So the 'freedom from' opens up possibilities for the 'freedom to'. Conversely, abusing the 'freedom to', ties us up again with the things that we were seeking 'freedom from'.