Meditation exercise on "separate me"

[Cleric K]

For me, the true polarity of freedom is not from-to. The crystal-clear polarity of freedom is karma! How could it not be so. Thus freedom has an intrinsic character of action in timeflow. You are on top of the idea of Time, and yet, strangely, you conceive freedom as if estranged from the timeflow. You flatten it out on a hypothetical sort of 'time-neutral plane' on which you put the dot of the-right-thing-to-do, alongside many other dots, the less-right things, the wrong ones, the evil ones. All these alternative dots stand “there” (where?) alongside each other, as you claim. You call them temptations, more-than-one-way-to-do-things, etcetera.

Imagine a bouquet of flowers. I think your error is the same error one would make by trying to put it in a vase flowers first, instead of stems first. As Max Leyf wrote - have you carefully read his essay? It doesn't look like you did - freedom must be grasped in its dynamism. If you envision the movement of putting a bouquet of flowers in a narrow vase from the stems, versus from the flowers, and what it does to the bouquet in both cases, you will maybe get what I’m trying to say. And if you don’t like the bouquet of flowers, you could think of your (Cleric) recent metaphor of the tunnel of glyphs. As you said there, we can imagine that we move through the tunnel backwards, and what we perceive on the walls is our course of (mental, hearty, and physical) action, perceived through memory. That’s our awareness of our flow of becoming. So we can steer the flow through our free agency, to the extent that we let knowledge inflow it, from the future (in the metaphor, from the back). In the metaphoric context of the tunnel, we could picture the growing, free steering activity as our prism-body becoming a bigger, taller prism, as it walks backwards. In this way, more knowledge hits the prism of our individuality, and we can project on the walls more and more of the right glyphs, thanks to greater and greater free agency.

Now, in your vision of freedom, based on “more than one way to do things”,“temptation always arises”, etcetera, it’s as if you pretended to be moving in multiple tunnels at the same time! You pick one of the tunnels, you look at the glyphs on that one, and say: “these glyphs are an alternative solution”, or “here it is, a temptation arises”. But this doesn’t make sense! Really, you are looking at ‘hypothetical past glyphs’, but you are calling them potential, or temptation. No way... There is only our own tunnel, and our own glyphs on one side, including our errors, to learn from, and, on the other side of the tunnel, there's our free activity of better and better incorporating knowledge from the future (behind our back), better and better refracting it on the tunnel’s walls through our brighter and brighter prism quality. Freedom is expressed in our prism-quality that projects glyphs on the walls. Freedom is not expressed in alternative sets of glyphs that could hypothetically be found on a variety of diverse tunnels. Do you understand?

Federica, you are completely right that freedom is not about perceiving glyphs, like a kid perceiving many kinds of candy and having the 'freedom' to choose. There's no question that freedom lies in the 'prism-quality'. Let me try to approach this once again, in a probably somewhat surprising way.

We can draw a parallel between what's going on here and what often happens in conversations with Eugene. Now please don't take it as a slap in the face that I attempt to draw such a comparison. I must declare that there are absolutely no personal emotions here. The goal is only to approach these questions from more sides.

What is the basic conundrum in all the talks with Eugene? It's the absolutization of the Divine essence within us into the way we experience it in our present human stage (even if enlightened). We secretly feel as one with the apex of the pyramid and only expect reality to fill the cone below it in the course of evolution. This has been contrasted many times with another picture, such as this one used in the Central Topic. You understand this very well. Actually the glyph tunnel is practically the same picture but presented from within. The unity of our inner life is the ego. It is the intuition that integrates all experiences into the holistic story of a metamorphosing being.

The reason talks with Eugene can't get to the needed depth is because the oneness is abused. We can speak of oneness only because we know the oneness of our soul life - the integration of everything we experience in relation to the one "I". This is the lower cone. This oneness seems like the final frontier. After all, what could be more one than one? Eugene was outraged when it was mentioned that we have to actually cure ourselves of this kind of oneness, which is really the last fetter before entering the spiritual world. Since this is not done, one remains wondering how can we advance in meditation. Then if one is presented with something about the spiritual world, it is immediately dismissed because it seems too fragmented, too lost in multiplicity.

Let's contemplate this well: when we meditate on oneness we feel to be at the upper boundary of reality because as said, what could we be more one than one? There's no such thing. So everything else must lie below, in multiplicity.

Now something analogous happens here but in a different way. Freedom has to do with drawing the impulses for our spiritual activity from our innermost core. If there are interfering factors, glyphs, temptations, candies and so on, these only point to multiplicity and karmic entanglement. But now the question arises: what happens with this process when it goes well into the future? What is the experience of a being that has become so free that almost everything it does springs from the individual source?

It may not be obvious but this bears some relation with the oneness scenario. Notice the commonality: in both cases there's a certain foundational idea and a question. We have often asked Eugene how he envisions future existence (which should unfold oneness even further). The answers are usually of the kind that things are too orthogonal to anything we can know on Earth. It's like saying "I don't know what it will be like but I know that much that it won’t be like you say because what you speak of obviously moves in the opposite direction of oneness."

It is similar here. It is not known what the future will be like but it is expected that the sovereignty of the individual agency should become more and more pronounced. On these grounds, anything that speaks of palettes, choices, etc. is seen as moving in the opposite direction, as fragmenting the individual source of freedom.

In both cases the hourglass shape is not properly taken into account. As soon as we cross the threshold, we find multiplicity again although in a very different way. That's why the abstract idea of oneness is the last fetter - as long as we cling to it, we would never allow ourselves to discover the multiplicity of the spiritual world. This multiplicity is of a radically different character compared to the multiplicity of glyphs or candies. It is multiplicity in the prism itself, in our innermost intuitive core. We find that our ego is really a constellation of spiritual beings.

Naturally, it is quite difficult to speak of these states because they belong to the stage of Intuition. We have to renounce Imagination and Inspiration and remain only with our pure intuitive spirit. Here we face the difficult part. If we expect that freedom consists in drawing more and more upon the unity of our sovereign individuality, we would never allow ourselves to know the true reality of our ego. We'll keep searching for what is more one than one, we’ll look to conduct our spiritual activity as if emerging from a singularity that is more and more independent of everything (thus ever freer).

So if this is the case why does Steiner mislead us in PoF to seek freedom by drawing upon our individual spiritual being? He doesn't mislead us but we have to remember that PoF leads us to the bottleneck of the hourglass. It is completely true that we have to free ourselves from the multiplicity of the lower cone in order to find freedom in the flow through the pinhole of the "I". But if we imagine that further evolution would only make this pinhole tighter and tighter, as if we draw more and more of our impulses from our individual agency, we simply preclude any possibility to know the intuitive reality of the "I". This we can only know when we experience our ego as the unity within multiplicity of spiritual beings (the Christ being of course serving as the central inspirer of the coherency).

The most difficult thing here is that we're used to conceive of beings only as something that impresses into our phenomenal world and we confront them with our "I". Then we can say that we're free if we don't allow ourselves to be dragged by the phenomena but instead draw our impulses from our innermost spiritual being. The spiritual beings in the Intuitive world however, don't impress in our inner world in this way. Instead, we find them when our "I" partitions and we understand the streams that constitute it as living spiritual beings. It's obvious that at this stage we can't go on to seek freedom in the exact same way, as seeking our impulses as emerging from the singular source of our "I". Instead, our impulses now stream as interplay of the spiritual beings that we balance consciously. Our “I” is centered at an infinitesimal point around which the Cosmic mandala of intuitive beings produce constructive interference. If we insist that we draw our impulses from that point, we find nothing there. We peel the layers of reality until there’s nothing. Our “I” has existence only as the constellation of beings. For this reason freedom is a matter of dynamic harmonization of these intuitive streams.

I hope the basic message is clear. Just like focusing on oneness leads us to a dead end, so does imagining that the inner experience of freedom is like drawing ever more our impulses from our individual agency. When we shatter the last fetter, our innermost intuitive self is found to be weaved of living intuitive beings. Pictorially speaking, one stream comes from Libra, another from Aries and so on. The grand difficulty is that the reality of this can’t be exhausted through Imagination or even Inspiration. In Imagination we still live in the metamorphosing glyphs in which Intuition is reflected. In Inspiration we hear the meaning of Intuition as World Thoughts. Only in Intuition itself we live in the reality of the “I”, where we find the beings not as something with which we interacts and emancipate from (in order to be more free) but as the intuitive streams which constitute our “I”-reality and that of the World. Freedom is now a matter of understanding how our intuitive point of balance is weaved of the streams of the Cosmic constellation and how we regulate that balance.

[AshvinP]

Returning directly to the question of Jupiter existence, I would like to share a passage from Tomberg which I think also aligns well with what we have been discussing, and what Cleric just wrote on the inversion of I-consciousness across the threshold.

The evolution of the manas (the spirit self) will be perfected by humankind only toward the end of the Jupiter period, which will follow the evolution of the Earth. The manas will then form a unity with the human “I,” so that human beings will not merely receive manas revelations nor even seek after and attain manas knowledge; they will perform manas acts. The manas being in human beings will become the human creative force with which they will work.
...
Manas knowing is, in essence, different from that attained by means of the rational soul, or even by the consciousness soul. If cognition can be reached by means of these soul forces (whose characteristic is gradual ascent), then manas cognition is a gradual descent. Thus, in ascending cognition, for instance, nature (mineral, plant, animal) would be recognized first, then human beings, and finally the suprahuman spiritual world. But in manas cognition, the process would be reversed. Spirit would be recognized first, then human nature, and finally mineral nature. In the path of manas cognition, the highest soul forces are first apprehended, and a gradual descent follows. Thus the beings of the suprasensory world are recognized first, and only later the phenomena of the world in which they express themselves. Cognition gained through ordinary soul forces is attained by ascending from cognition of the phenomenal to the beings behind it. Thus the kingdoms of nature must be studied first to find definite archetypal forms expressed in them. Once the archetypal forms are found, it becomes possible to ascend from there to cognizing the spirits of form, or elohim. In manas cognition, however, the beings of the elohim will be recognized first, and only later (sometimes after a long time) their revelations in nature processes.

[Federica]

For me, the true polarity of freedom is not from-to. The crystal-clear polarity of freedom is karma! How could it not be so. Thus freedom has an intrinsic character of action in timeflow. You are on top of the idea of Time, and yet, strangely, you conceive freedom as if estranged from the timeflow. You flatten it out on a hypothetical sort of 'time-neutral plane' on which you put the dot of the-right-thing-to-do, alongside many other dots, the less-right things, the wrong ones, the evil ones. All these alternative dots stand “there” (where?) alongside each other, as you claim. You call them temptations, more-than-one-way-to-do-things, etcetera.

Imagine a bouquet of flowers. I think your error is the same error one would make by trying to put it in a vase flowers first, instead of stems first. As Max Leyf wrote - have you carefully read his essay? It doesn't look like you did - freedom must be grasped in its dynamism. If you envision the movement of putting a bouquet of flowers in a narrow vase from the stems, versus from the flowers, and what it does to the bouquet in both cases, you will maybe get what I’m trying to say. And if you don’t like the bouquet of flowers, you could think of your (Cleric) recent metaphor of the tunnel of glyphs. As you said there, we can imagine that we move through the tunnel backwards, and what we perceive on the walls is our course of (mental, hearty, and physical) action, perceived through memory. That’s our awareness of our flow of becoming. So we can steer the flow through our free agency, to the extent that we let knowledge inflow it, from the future (in the metaphor, from the back). In the metaphoric context of the tunnel, we could picture the growing, free steering activity as our prism-body becoming a bigger, taller prism, as it walks backwards. In this way, more knowledge hits the prism of our individuality, and we can project on the walls more and more of the right glyphs, thanks to greater and greater free agency.

Now, in your vision of freedom, based on “more than one way to do things”,“temptation always arises”, etcetera, it’s as if you pretended to be moving in multiple tunnels at the same time! You pick one of the tunnels, you look at the glyphs on that one, and say: “these glyphs are an alternative solution”, or “here it is, a temptation arises”. But this doesn’t make sense! Really, you are looking at ‘hypothetical past glyphs’, but you are calling them potential, or temptation. No way... There is only our own tunnel, and our own glyphs on one side, including our errors, to learn from, and, on the other side of the tunnel, there's our free activity of better and better incorporating knowledge from the future (behind our back), better and better refracting it on the tunnel’s walls through our brighter and brighter prism quality. Freedom is expressed in our prism-quality that projects glyphs on the walls. Freedom is not expressed in alternative sets of glyphs that could hypothetically be found on a variety of diverse tunnels. Do you understand?

Federica, you are completely right that freedom is not about perceiving glyphs, like a kid perceiving many kinds of candy and having the 'freedom' to choose. There's no question that freedom lies in the 'prism-quality'. Let me try to approach this once again, in a probably somewhat surprising way.

We can draw a parallel between what's going on here and what often happens in conversations with Eugene. Now please don't take it as a slap in the face that I attempt to draw such a comparison. I must declare that there are absolutely no personal emotions here. The goal is only to approach these questions from more sides.

What is the basic conundrum in all the talks with Eugene? It's the absolutization of the Divine essence within us into the way we experience it in our present human stage (even if enlightened). We secretly feel as one with the apex of the pyramid and only expect reality to fill the cone below it in the course of evolution. This has been contrasted many times with another picture, such as this one used in the Central Topic. You understand this very well. Actually the glyph tunnel is practically the same picture but presented from within. The unity of our inner life is the ego. It is the intuition that integrates all experiences into the holistic story of a metamorphosing being.

The reason talks with Eugene can't get to the needed depth is because the oneness is abused. We can speak of oneness only because we know the oneness of our soul life - the integration of everything we experience in relation to the one "I". This is the lower cone. This oneness seems like the final frontier. After all, what could be more one than one? Eugene was outraged when it was mentioned that we have to actually cure ourselves of this kind of oneness, which is really the last fetter before entering the spiritual world. Since this is not done, one remains wondering how can we advance in meditation. Then if one is presented with something about the spiritual world, it is immediately dismissed because it seems too fragmented, too lost in multiplicity.

Let's contemplate this well: when we meditate on oneness we feel to be at the upper boundary of reality because as said, what could we be more one than one? There's no such thing. So everything else must lie below, in multiplicity.

Now something analogous happens here but in a different way. Freedom has to do with drawing the impulses for our spiritual activity from our innermost core. If there are interfering factors, glyphs, temptations, candies and so on, these only point to multiplicity and karmic entanglement. But now the question arises: what happens with this process when it goes well into the future? What is the experience of a being that has become so free that almost everything it does springs from the individual source?

It may not be obvious but this bears some relation with the oneness scenario. Notice the commonality: in both cases there's a certain foundational idea and a question. We have often asked Eugene how he envisions future existence (which should unfold oneness even further). The answers are usually of the kind that things are too orthogonal to anything we can know on Earth. It's like saying "I don't know what it will be like but I know that much that it won’t be like you say because what you speak of obviously moves in the opposite direction of oneness."

It is similar here. It is not known what the future will be like but it is expected that the sovereignty of the individual agency should become more and more pronounced. On these grounds, anything that speaks of palettes, choices, etc. is seen as moving in the opposite direction, as fragmenting the individual source of freedom.

In both cases the hourglass shape is not properly taken into account. As soon as we cross the threshold, we find multiplicity again although in a very different way. That's why the abstract idea of oneness is the last fetter - as long as we cling to it, we would never allow ourselves to discover the multiplicity of the spiritual world. This multiplicity is of a radically different character compared to the multiplicity of glyphs or candies. It is multiplicity in the prism itself, in our innermost intuitive core. We find that our ego is really a constellation of spiritual beings.

Naturally, it is quite difficult to speak of these states because they belong to the stage of Intuition. We have to renounce Imagination and Inspiration and remain only with our pure intuitive spirit. Here we face the difficult part. If we expect that freedom consists in drawing more and more upon the unity of our sovereign individuality, we would never allow ourselves to know the true reality of our ego. We'll keep searching for what is more one than one, we’ll look to conduct our spiritual activity as if emerging from a singularity that is more and more independent of everything (thus ever freer).

So if this is the case why does Steiner mislead us in PoF to seek freedom by drawing upon our individual spiritual being? He doesn't mislead us but we have to remember that PoF leads us to the bottleneck of the hourglass. It is completely true that we have to free ourselves from the multiplicity of the lower cone in order to find freedom in the flow through the pinhole of the "I". But if we imagine that further evolution would only make this pinhole tighter and tighter, as if we draw more and more of our impulses from our individual agency, we simply preclude any possibility to know the intuitive reality of the "I". This we can only know when we experience our ego as the unity within multiplicity of spiritual beings (the Christ being of course serving as the central inspirer of the coherency).

The most difficult thing here is that we're used to conceive of beings only as something that impresses into our phenomenal world and we confront them with our "I". Then we can say that we're free if we don't allow ourselves to be dragged by the phenomena but instead draw our impulses from our innermost spiritual being. The spiritual beings in the Intuitive world however, don't impress in our inner world in this way. Instead, we find them when our "I" partitions and we understand the streams that constitute it as living spiritual beings. It's obvious that at this stage we can't go on to seek freedom in the exact same way, as seeking our impulses as emerging from the singular source of our "I". Instead, our impulses now stream as interplay of the spiritual beings that we balance consciously. Our “I” is centered at an infinitesimal point around which the Cosmic mandala of intuitive beings produce constructive interference. If we insist that we draw our impulses from that point, we find nothing there. We peel the layers of reality until there’s nothing. Our “I” has existence only as the constellation of beings. For this reason freedom is a matter of dynamic harmonization of these intuitive streams.

I hope the basic message is clear. Just like focusing on oneness leads us to a dead end, so does imagining that the inner experience of freedom is like drawing ever more our impulses from our individual agency. When we shatter the last fetter, our innermost intuitive self is found to be weaved of living intuitive beings. Pictorially speaking, one stream comes from Libra, another from Aries and so on. The grand difficulty is that the reality of this can’t be exhausted through Imagination or even Inspiration. In Imagination we still live in the metamorphosing glyphs in which Intuition is reflected. In Inspiration we hear the meaning of Intuition as World Thoughts. Only in Intuition itself we live in the reality of the “I”, where we find the beings not as something with which we interacts and emancipate from (in order to be more free) but as the intuitive streams which constitute our “I”-reality and that of the World. Freedom is now a matter of understanding how our intuitive point of balance is weaved of the streams of the Cosmic constellation and how we regulate that balance.

Many thanks, Cleric, for this reply. There's no way I could take this as a slap in the face, I don't get how this idea could arise. Anyway, as of now, I am struggling to get a clear grasp of what you wrote. I hope I will be able to better understand it with more patience and effort. For now, I fail to see how it connects with your previous posts on freedom in this thread. Even if I attempt to let go of the old posts, focusing on this last one only, I struggle to see how it connects with the quoted text. Maybe it's because much of my effort has to go into making that disconnection, and I will do better as soon as I will be able to let go of that, which probably relates with tasks requiring urgent attention in my backlog of tasks, that is facilitated by your post, even if this is not its intended goal. Or maybe my difficulties depend on the fact that I don't know higher cognition, let alone Intuition, and I should just accept that I can't get the deep meaning of freedom for now. Anyhow, the issue remains of understanding present freedom, at PoF level, which is what I was addressing in the quoted text. Well, thank you, again. I hope your post can be immediately clarifying and useful for others, and hopefully for me too, as I keep working.

[Federica]

Returning directly to the question of Jupiter existence, I would like to share a passage from Tomberg which I think also aligns well with what we have been discussing, and what Cleric just wrote on the inversion of I-consciousness across the threshold.

The evolution of the manas (the spirit self) will be perfected by humankind only toward the end of the Jupiter period, which will follow the evolution of the Earth. The manas will then form a unity with the human “I,” so that human beings will not merely receive manas revelations nor even seek after and attain manas knowledge; they will perform manas acts. The manas being in human beings will become the human creative force with which they will work.
...
Manas knowing is, in essence, different from that attained by means of the rational soul, or even by the consciousness soul. If cognition can be reached by means of these soul forces (whose characteristic is gradual ascent), then manas cognition is a gradual descent. Thus, in ascending cognition, for instance, nature (mineral, plant, animal) would be recognized first, then human beings, and finally the suprahuman spiritual world. But in manas cognition, the process would be reversed. Spirit would be recognized first, then human nature, and finally mineral nature. In the path of manas cognition, the highest soul forces are first apprehended, and a gradual descent follows. Thus the beings of the suprasensory world are recognized first, and only later the phenomena of the world in which they express themselves. Cognition gained through ordinary soul forces is attained by ascending from cognition of the phenomenal to the beings behind it. Thus the kingdoms of nature must be studied first to find definite archetypal forms expressed in them. Once the archetypal forms are found, it becomes possible to ascend from there to cognizing the spirits of form, or elohim. In manas cognition, however, the beings of the elohim will be recognized first, and only later (sometimes after a long time) their revelations in nature processes.

Thanks Ashvin. This seems to fly too high for me to be able to distinguish anything useful in these words. I don't even remember what manas, or spirit self exactly is, in the graduation of various levels of consciousness. So far, I refrained from making charts and classifications, but maybe I should, after all, before and until these concepts become entirely self-evident. Maybe it's simply that looking towards the end of the Jupiter era is not what I should try to focus on right now. It reminds me of a metaphor Cleric once used, the frosted glass.

[Federica]

That's a great quote, Federica, thanks for sharing it.

Yes, it does generally seem like an odd fit (the love by and of Christ, and freedom). Especially with our confused notions of 'love' today and our equally confused notions of 'faith'. The dualistic thinking habits are so ingrained today that it's hard for us to see how the poles of love and truth work through each other to ground our freedom. I think this is especially a problem for modern religious people, whether Western or Eastern, theistic or mystical. What is called 'love' is actually a Luciferic 'pity' which is driven only by passionate feeling and basically shuns knowledge of the Spirit in clearly contoured concepts and ideas. We also see that permeating many leftist ideological movements today. The Love of Christ, however, is that which descends to humanity as His potential equal and desires for us to realize our full human potential and reach back to the Father through ennobled, enlivened thinking and Self-knowledge. Here is a great passage on that difference from Tomberg.

This naturally leads to a question: In the second study, the “fall of the angels”—the luciferic rebellion—was represented as a result of emotional compassion; here, arrogance or presumption is alleged as its cause. How can these two explanations be reconciled? Compassion is not really the right word to express precisely the reason behind the defection of Lucifer from the gods. The appropriate term is not contained in the English, French, or German languages. The Russian word shalostj, by contrast, gives an exact idea of the essential cause of Lucifer’s rebellion. It means pity for a being who is felt to be too weak to free itself from a painful situation. This feeling is distinct from compassion (which in Russian is sostradanie), because compassion may also be felt for someone who is respected, whereas the feeling intended here is a contemptuous pity. It contains within itself a hidden scorn for the being for whom this kind of compassion is felt.

This feeling—as well as the ideology it evokes in most important human affairs—becomes intelligible when we read the chapter about the Grand Inquisitor in Feodor Dostoevsky’s book The Brothers Karamazov. There, more clearly than anywhere else, the difference between the love of Jesus Christ and the love of the Grand Inquisitor is shown. Whereas Christ, by his action, shows the greatest possible respect for humankind—not working by miracle and power, but by sacrifice (the temptation in the wilderness)—the Grand Inquisitor, on the other hand, is convinced that humanity is incapable of coming to Christ in freedom; Christ’s error must be remedied through those who are prepared to bear the cross of guardianship and assume sole responsibility for humankind. The Grand Inquisitor does not love humankind as Christ does; he feels a burning but contemptuous compassion for human beings. Freedom, he is convinced, should be reserved for the few chosen ones; but the mass of humanity should be led. And if Christ were to appear again, it would be the Grand Inquisitor’s duty—even though he had recognized him—to imprison him as a dangerous heretic, whose coming would bring confusion to the masses of humankind under his tutelage; the specter of freedom would arise again and destroy his work of compassion.

This chapter of Dostoevsky’s work helps us understand, deep in our heart, the reasons for the luciferic opposition to the divine purposes. This understanding of the heart shows us that luciferic compassion in its true form is nothing but arrogance and overweening pride; it is based on a low esteem of humanity, of which Lucifer was to assume the guardianship. Hence, it is no contradiction to say that Lucifer rebelled against the gods out of pride, while at the same time he pitied humanity. What the soul experiences as luciferic compassion is overweening spiritual pride.

Tomberg, Valentin; Bruce, R.H.. Christ and Sophia: Anthroposophic Meditations on the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocalypse (p. 61). steinerbooks. Kindle Edition.

Yes, I understand the difference. The word that comes to mind to describe that sort of luciferic compassion is simply superiority. What's described is the inevitable way of relating to others when coming from a place of superiority. I wouldn't use the word pity, let alone love. It has too little to do with those. So this passage is useful to understand Lucifer, and how his impulse plays out, but I don't think it relates very much to the question. I don't think my problem with understanding freedom, and how it's grounded in Love, has much to do with this kind of contemptuous mode of relation. Not to say that I illude myself, and believe I'm free from luciferic influences. But I guess they play out more at the level of thinking than at the level of feeling.

[AshvinP]

That's a great quote, Federica, thanks for sharing it.

Yes, it does generally seem like an odd fit (the love by and of Christ, and freedom). Especially with our confused notions of 'love' today and our equally confused notions of 'faith'. The dualistic thinking habits are so ingrained today that it's hard for us to see how the poles of love and truth work through each other to ground our freedom. I think this is especially a problem for modern religious people, whether Western or Eastern, theistic or mystical. What is called 'love' is actually a Luciferic 'pity' which is driven only by passionate feeling and basically shuns knowledge of the Spirit in clearly contoured concepts and ideas. We also see that permeating many leftist ideological movements today. The Love of Christ, however, is that which descends to humanity as His potential equal and desires for us to realize our full human potential and reach back to the Father through ennobled, enlivened thinking and Self-knowledge. Here is a great passage on that difference from Tomberg.

This naturally leads to a question: In the second study, the “fall of the angels”—the luciferic rebellion—was represented as a result of emotional compassion; here, arrogance or presumption is alleged as its cause. How can these two explanations be reconciled? Compassion is not really the right word to express precisely the reason behind the defection of Lucifer from the gods. The appropriate term is not contained in the English, French, or German languages. The Russian word shalostj, by contrast, gives an exact idea of the essential cause of Lucifer’s rebellion. It means pity for a being who is felt to be too weak to free itself from a painful situation. This feeling is distinct from compassion (which in Russian is sostradanie), because compassion may also be felt for someone who is respected, whereas the feeling intended here is a contemptuous pity. It contains within itself a hidden scorn for the being for whom this kind of compassion is felt.

This feeling—as well as the ideology it evokes in most important human affairs—becomes intelligible when we read the chapter about the Grand Inquisitor in Feodor Dostoevsky’s book The Brothers Karamazov. There, more clearly than anywhere else, the difference between the love of Jesus Christ and the love of the Grand Inquisitor is shown. Whereas Christ, by his action, shows the greatest possible respect for humankind—not working by miracle and power, but by sacrifice (the temptation in the wilderness)—the Grand Inquisitor, on the other hand, is convinced that humanity is incapable of coming to Christ in freedom; Christ’s error must be remedied through those who are prepared to bear the cross of guardianship and assume sole responsibility for humankind. The Grand Inquisitor does not love humankind as Christ does; he feels a burning but contemptuous compassion for human beings. Freedom, he is convinced, should be reserved for the few chosen ones; but the mass of humanity should be led. And if Christ were to appear again, it would be the Grand Inquisitor’s duty—even though he had recognized him—to imprison him as a dangerous heretic, whose coming would bring confusion to the masses of humankind under his tutelage; the specter of freedom would arise again and destroy his work of compassion.

This chapter of Dostoevsky’s work helps us understand, deep in our heart, the reasons for the luciferic opposition to the divine purposes. This understanding of the heart shows us that luciferic compassion in its true form is nothing but arrogance and overweening pride; it is based on a low esteem of humanity, of which Lucifer was to assume the guardianship. Hence, it is no contradiction to say that Lucifer rebelled against the gods out of pride, while at the same time he pitied humanity. What the soul experiences as luciferic compassion is overweening spiritual pride.

Tomberg, Valentin; Bruce, R.H.. Christ and Sophia: Anthroposophic Meditations on the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocalypse (p. 61). steinerbooks. Kindle Edition.

Yes, I understand the difference. The word that comes to mind to describe that sort of luciferic compassion is simply superiority. What's described is the inevitable way of relating to others when coming from a place of superiority. I wouldn't use the word pity, let alone love. It has too little to do with those. So this passage is useful to understand Lucifer, and how his impulse plays out, but I don't think it relates very much to the question. I don't think my problem with understanding freedom, and how it's grounded in Love, has much to do with this kind of contemptuous mode of relation. Not to say that I illude myself, and believe I'm free from luciferic influences. But I guess they play out more at the level of thinking than at the level of feeling.

Perhaps there is a simpler angle of approach. Basically we are speaking of the hysteresis process. When our "I" submerges into the perceptual spectrum, this can be considered an act of love. We are devoting attention to something beyond ourselves and our own personal interests, to the extent our activity is motivated by thoughtful desire to understand our relations with the World and how to more harmoniously fit in with them. That happens when we manage to spiral the thinking pole of the hysteresis into the will-perception pole, so the latter is guided by moral intuitions, inspirations, imaginations and the former is enlivened with the force of love which we normally find in physical or limited social relations.

Does that make the thinking-love polar relation more clear?

I think the other issue is to remain open that our experience of the hysteresis is not static, but changes with each new stage of cognition. Perhaps a more relatable expression than present day and the era of 'manas cognition' is that between normal cognition and imaginative cognition. In our normal cognition, we start with particular sensory impressions and from there derive an overarching idea. We see flowers, a flower bed, plants, vegetables, an orderly pattern, a fence, etc. and come to the idea of 'garden' (as opposed to 'forest' or something similar). With imaginative cognition, it's more like we start with the image of 'garden', not only as dim mental picture but something alive and temporally extended, and from there we very quickly come to concepts of innocence, order, harmonious working between man and nature, etc. and the particular impressions are all perceived through that context. All those concepts-percepts are also understood as the outer expressions of manifold spiritual beings, archetypal and elemental.

It is not actually a fundamental change in the essential process of cognition, but a retracing of it. Instead of only being awake at the very tail end of the cognitive process where the river lets out into a sea of perceptions, we awaken further upstream. Even at this level, as indicated in Cleric's post, we have not found our "I" as the interfering activity of the Cosmos . But nevertheless, if we approach through proper spiritual training, the reality can be clearly sensed. I suppose the main point here is to simply remain open to our vastly different experience of the polar rhythm along the gradient of "I"-activity, through which we gradually win our freedom. We can't take a snapshot at any given point (like 'PoF-level') and say 'this is what it looks like to be free or become free', because the actual experience of how our moral intuition, inspiration, imagination flows into our will consists in a series of polar opposites across the threshold. It is true that we can speak of 'freedom' in general PoF principles, but we shouldn't let that resolution interfere without our ability to investigate certain unfamiliar, or even seemingly opposite, ways in which the freedom manifests along the gradient.

That said, I certainly acknowledge the very fact you are still discussing this in an open-ended and diligent way means you are willing to conduct such investigations.

[Federica]

Does that make the thinking-love polar relation more clear?

Yes, conceptually it does, and I remember you presented it in this way before, so I am familiar with this idea. Yet, it remains rather conceptual for me. In comparison, what I said a few posts above about the creative responsibility made possible by "the greater palette" (that shows that I discount love, as you noted):

I would definitely consider an expression of freedom the formation of the environmental basis for other beings, because it comprises the element of agency, and the element of integrating and transforming knowledge in unique ways. These two aspects, seem to be a constitutive, necessary part of creating the proper environment for the development of animal life, or whatever other part of the cosmos it might be. So I gladly associate that creative responsibility with freedom.

to me is actually an immediate and concrete way to express freedom and agency as love, through action. But as you say, I try to remain open that change will happen, and that I may see things in a certain way right now only because the relevant polarities in which the will is grounded remain veiled from my perspective.


Of course, it's a dangerous path to walk, going on the cliff edge, if you will, when one has to constantly give way and put discrepancies and doubts on oneself, ascribe them to personal inadequacy and put them on the list of the things that will hopefully become clearer in the right way in the future. But well, I can't do much more than trying my best in every moment.

[AshvinP]

Does that make the thinking-love polar relation more clear?

Yes, conceptually it does, and I remember you presented it in this way before, so I am familiar with this idea. Yet, it remains rather conceptual for me. In comparison, what I said a few posts above about the creative responsibility made possible by "the greater palette" (that shows that I discount love, as you noted):

I would definitely consider an expression of freedom the formation of the environmental basis for other beings, because it comprises the element of agency, and the element of integrating and transforming knowledge in unique ways. These two aspects, seem to be a constitutive, necessary part of creating the proper environment for the development of animal life, or whatever other part of the cosmos it might be. So I gladly associate that creative responsibility with freedom.

to me is actually an immediate and concrete way to express freedom and agency as love, through action. But as you say, I try to remain open that change will happen, and that I may see things in a certain way right now only because the relevant polarities in which the will is grounded remain veiled from my perspective.


Of course, it's a dangerous path to walk, going on the cliff edge, if you will, when one has to constantly give way and put discrepancies and doubts on oneself, ascribe them to personal inadequacy and put them on the list of the things that will hopefully become clearer in the right way in the future. But well, I can't do much more than trying my best in every moment.

Right, it took me some time to get used to that as well. There are still many times I find seeming 'contradictions' in Steiner's expressions of spiritual dynamics, but it has become much easier for me to put the limitation on my own current perspective and lack of inner knowledge, and generally remain patient. It helps when we begin to see a lot of those seeming discrepancies or contradictions naturally resolved over time through our own inner development.

I agree your quote is a helpful and concrete way to express the relation. And, apart from the obvious outer creative responsibility towards plants and animals that we have culturally adopted, we have been engaged in that redemptive agency for some time now in regards to elemental beings of external nature, even if we are so far unaware of this fact in our current incarnation. I think much of the vascillating condition of our soul-state throughout the day can be tied directly to what Steiner expresses below, which I quoted on another thread.

How are those spiritual, divine beings who surround us able to produce solid matter as it is on our planet — to produce liquids, and air substances? They send down their elemental spirits, those which live in the fire: they imprison them in air, in water and in earth. These are the emissaries, the elemental emissaries of the spiritual, creative, building beings. The elemental spirits first enter into fire. In fire they still feel comfortable — if we care to express it by images — and then they are condemned to a life of bewitchment. We can say looking around us: ‘These beings, whom we have to thank for all the things that surround us, had to come down out of the fire-element; they are bewitched in those things.’

Can we as men do anything to help those elemental spirits? This is the great question which was put by the Holy Rishis. Can we do anything to release, to redeem, all that is here, bewitched? Yes! We can help them. Because what we men do here in the physical world is nothing else than an outward expression of spiritual processes. All we do is also of importance for the spiritual world. Let us consider the following. A man stands in front of a crystal, or a lump of gold, or anything of that kind. He looks at it. What happens when a man simply gazes, simply stares with his physical eye upon some outer object? A continual interplay occurs between the man and the bewitched elemental spirits. The man and that which is bewitched in the substance have something to do with each other. Let us suppose that the man only stares at the object and takes in only what is impressed on his physical eye. Something is always passing from the elemental being into the man. Something from those bewitched elementals passes continually into the man, from morning till night. While you are thus regarding objects, hosts of these elemental beings, who were and are being continually bewitched through the world-processes of condensation, are continually entering from your surroundings into you. Let us take it that the man staring at the objects has no inclination whatever to think about those objects, no inclination to let the spirit of things live in his soul. He lives comfortably, merely passes through the world, but he does not work on it spiritually, with his ideas or feelings or in any such way. He remains simply a spectator of the material things he meets with in the world. Then these elemental spirits pass into him and remain there, having gained nothing from the world's process, but the fact of having passed from the outer world into man. Let us take another kind of man, one who works spiritually on the impressions he receives from the outer world, who with his understanding and ideas forms conceptions regarding the spiritual foundations of the world, one who does not simply stare at a metal, but ponders over its nature and feels the beauty which inspires and spiritualises his impressions. What does such a man do? Through his own spiritual process, he releases the elemental being which has streamed into him from the outer world; he raises it to what it was before, he frees the elemental from its state of enchantment. Thus, through our own spiritual life, we can, without changing them, either imprison within us those spirits which are bewitched in air, water and earth, or else through our own increasing spirituality, free them and lead them back to their own element. During the whole of his earthly life, man lets those elemental spirits stream into him from the outer world. In the same measure in which he only stares at things, in the same measure in which he simply lets the spirit dwell in him without transforming them, so, in like measure as he tries with his ideas, conceptions and feeling for beauty to work out spiritually what he sees in the outer world, does he release and redeem those spiritual elemental beings.

[Federica]

I agree your quote is a helpful and concrete way to express the relation.

I'm surprised to read this, Ashvin, because when I wrote that first, you commented that I was clearly discounting the polarity of Love. And you went on attracting my attention to luciferic contempt (by the way, I suggest this could be the word Tomberg was not founding in English). Anyhow, that's another discrepancy to add to the list. Strangely, I am not super eager to do it. Or, I could add it, and then put it on the back of the elemental beings, if I'm getting it right. Naturally, for the spiritually evolved, it will be evident which polarities behind the threshold I am being the puppet of, unbeknownst to me, as I am saying all this. But the good news is, although it may take time, as a human being, one can get used to just about anything.

[AshvinP]

I agree your quote is a helpful and concrete way to express the relation.

I'm surprised to read this, Ashvin, because when I wrote that first, you commented that I was clearly discounting the polarity of Love. And you went on attracting my attention to luciferic contempt (by the way, I suggest this could be the word Tomberg was not founding in English). Anyhow, that's another discrepancy to add to the list. Strangely, I am not super eager to do it. Or, I could add it, and then put it on the back of the elemental beings, if I'm getting it right. Naturally, for the spiritually evolved, it will be evident which polarities behind the threshold I am being the puppet of, unbeknownst to me, as I am saying all this. But the good news is, although it may take time, as a human being, one can get used to just about anything.

Federica,

It's not that I analyzed every single line in your comments and have judged each one of them one-sided or 'discounting', but just looking at the whole pattern of thinking through the 'freedom' issue on this thread. There were some parts of your reasoning which were spot on (and that's no surprise since you have clearly internalized much of PoF). As for that part in particular, it was evoked from my previous comment and you were clearly following the reasoning about our freedom emerging in part from our 'creative responsibility' for shaping the environment of lower beings. That is what Steiner's quote on the elemental beings was about as well. If we keep in mind our "I" is really the interference of activity within the whole spectrum of be-ings, as in Cleric's post, then it should become easier to discern how all these creative-redemptive efforts feed back into its potential for harmonious resonance with the Cosmic Will, the Truth which sets us free.

As for Luciferic 'contempt', I' don't think that's the proper word. In a sense, Lucifer ran up against the same concern many people have had for centuries now (or rather, many people have had this concern because our astral nature is woven from Lucifer's being) - how can a Loving god intend for his creatures to toil, suffer, and die on the Earthly plane? In other words, Lucifer 'read' something like the below and answered, 'there is no point to that!'

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?

(highlighted as a reminder to circle back on that!)

He didn't find the above reasoning convincing at all, until the sacrificial deed of Christ in the MoG. Then it dawned on him how, not only is divine love compatible with the Earthly development of the human 'I', but the highest form of Love can only come through that free I-activity. Lucifer initially wanted to free humanity from the Earthly context by force, which would effectively keep us as his dependents, rather than to renounce his angelic guidance so that humanity could free itself out of its own power. In that sense, he didn't oppose the Father or the Christ but only the Holy Spirit. Lucifer has now been redeemed through the MoG - he has inwardly transformed - but the karmic momentum of his past deeds continue to propogate through the time-decohered physical plane and our soul-strata when we are bound to that plane. Tragically, that provides a breeding ground for Ahriman (as Steiner put it, "Ahriman is Lucifer's karma"), who works directly against the Christ and has more of the contempt for humanity that you mention. He only wants humanity to become his food.