Meditation exercise on "separate me"

[Cleric K]

I have an unrelated question. Steiner wrote:

When the eye of the occultist has been opened and he looks out into the vast spaces of the world, he beholds a remarkable sight. He discovers that the Buddha has now for his scene of action that planet which in physical astronomy we call Mars; and he can do no other than relate in all seriousness how, since the time when the Buddha acquired the faculty which made it no longer necessary for him to appear again in Earth life, he has been given a new mission. This new mission of the Buddha we can discover by making occult observation of Mars.

As we enter upon this study, the true and original mission of the Buddha becomes clear to us. We find by occult investigation that the beings on Mars who correspond to men on Earth — they are of course of quite a different nature, but for the moment let us call them “Mars men” — at a certain time in their evolution were in a similar condition of need as were the Earth men in the Fourth Post-Atlantean period when the Christ had to come to them. And as Christ became a Saviour and an Awakener to Life, as that was a mission for the Christ in regard to Earth humanity, so is it a further mission for that Bodhisattva after he became the Buddha, to be a Saviour and Redeemer of Mars men. He has to accomplish on Mars an event similar to the event that the Christ had to bring to fulfilment on Earth.

However, the recent NASA missions to Mars did not find any signs of any civilization there. How do we explain that?

Ashvin's response already gives the essentials. It can be added that from the perspective of higher cognition the planetary spheres are like one within another. A rough analogy can be drawn with the electron shells of the atom. For this reason the soul or astral body, is actually weaved of all the spheres. In fact that's why the term 'astral' is at all justified. Even in this very moment, our physical body has local nature but the higher in our organization we climb, the more non-local our nature becomes. So even now with our higher members we belong to the Cosmos. It's only that the consciousness of these members is 'sucked in' so to speak in the local sense formations.

It is important to understand this because it is a main impediment on our way to higher cognition. It's the belief that we are a soul atom that as a whole package is placed on Earth. Then people are very suspicious when it is said that consciousness expands in the spheres because it is imagined that we leave Earth as a rocket and travel in outer space. The fact is that our sheaths already belong there, it's a matter of attaining consciosuness of this. This is achieved by our sheaths becoming resonantly attuned, like fractal levels, such that the experiences in the non-local levels can be 'amplified' through the gradient to the level of thoughts, which surely depend on the local formations of the etheric and physical brain and other organs. In other words, the brain has to become reflective not only for human spiritual activity related to the bodily organs but also for Cosmic spiritual activity that is always present non-locally in the spheres.

Mars men are the human-level beings whose soul nature is dominated by the Mars forces. Part of these forces are related to individualization and dominance. It's for this reason that the ancients understood the Mars sphere as the God of war. The Mars and all other sphere's forces live in the Earthly man too. We are a cross-section of the spheres, so to speak.

Mars men live in Imaginative consciousness, they don't have mineral bodies. Here we can change our notions a little. In esoteric sense, Earth is not simply one of the planets in our Solar system but the state of existence that manifests when the spirit descends into the decohered levels of the Solar 'wavefunction', so to speak. At that level all spheres have their mineral shadow (so in occult sense our rocky Moon, Mars and so on are also Earth) but in the course of evolution our planetary body has been made into the point of balance that allows for mineralization to go so far yet also remain bridgeable to the life of soul and spirit through the gradient of organic biology.

With this in mind, we can have Mars men walking on Earth, Venus men, Mercury men and so on. It's a matter of the dominant forces within the soul organism. Yet there are human souls that are too one-sidedly developed to have proper incarnation in the Earthly spectrum (which requires at least some degree of balance of all planetary forces to have a properly functioning physical body). In the disincarnate state these souls really form 'communities' with corresponding Imaginative structure. After each incarnation we do pass through these spheres. The fact that the Buddha works on Mars men means simply that he's tightly engaged with the sphere of the Mars forces. In certain sense, he has the not easy task to inspire transformations in the Mars nature. This work is accomplished in the Imaginative spectrum of the Mars sphere but we shouldn't imagine that Buddha is far away on the rocky planet Mars. Everything that is accomplished in the Mars sphere has its immediate significance in our Earthly state, as far as the Mars forces that are weaved into our being are concerned.

To be sure, the soul and spiritual activities of the Mars men must necessarily have their projection also in the mineral level. Similarly to the quote about the future human being, these disincarnate human beings' activities have their effects not only in our souls but also in the winds of Mars for example, but the conscious experience is such that these human beings don't feel like "I'm that whirlwind, you're the one over there" or something like that. They don't even perceive a rocky red planet on the surface of which they move. These human beings live psychic life, so to speak. They fight with their soul forces over their perspectives of their Imaginative dreamscape but that dreamscape doesn't rigidify to the level of mineral lawfulness (we need to be entangled with that part of the spectrum in our mineral bodies for this to happen).

[Stranger]

Mars men are the human-level beings whose soul nature is dominated by the Mars forces. Part of these forces are related to individualization and dominance. It's for this reason that the ancients understood the Mars sphere as the God of war. The Mars and all other sphere's forces live in the Earthly man too. We are a cross-section of the spheres, so to speak.

That's right, in Hindu and Buddhist traditions these are the realms of so-called Asuras - the souls whose psychic forces are related to wrath, pride and envy.

[Lou Gold]

Leonard Cohen on "What is a saint? "

A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men*, such balancing monsters of love.

A year later, Cohen contemplated what these “balancing monsters of love” do for us in his song “Sisters of Mercy”:

If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn,
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem.

From The Marginalian -- https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/02/ ... ers-saint/

[Federica]

I hear that you have a high sensitivity to words, which makes it difficult for you to go beyond the unpleasant impression you feel and really focus on what the sentence points to. This can depend on many factors, past experiences, particular feelings etc. I would say that it's a good thing that you noticed that, it's the first step to see that much of the unpleasant feeling you experience is mixed up with your personal history, rather than with supposedly objective meanings present in the words themselves. Can you see that the words by themselves are more neutral than it looked at first reading?

Now you are over the top condescending but I'm a human being and fine I'll just roll with it . . . but no, I find Ashwin's words anything but neutral, regardless of the content of his words, he is saying that no matter who you are or what path you take, you will see things the same way he does.
Re this thread - it's devolved into a battle of semantics, and way too deep in speculative esoteria for my tastes.

Lorenzo, sorry I'm answering a little late - yes I have tried to be "over the top condescending" in my language because I wanted to give my point the best chances to reach you, beyond the semantics, as you call them.

I'd like to ask you, what makes you sure that this thread is a battle of semantics, and not a debate about the true nature of reality? Do you mean that the exact nature of reality doesn't really matter, or that reality is undefined, or that it is maybe defined but beyond our possibility to understand, or something else?
What do you mean? What keeps you interested in this forum?

[Federica]

I haven't had a chance yet to carefully read all the posts again, but thank you for what has become a very dense thread on the forum, at least from my perspective. One thing I am confused about is whether Cleric's description of the future man:

There’s no one-to-one ‘mapping’ between the future man in the next aeon and our present man-unit. Instead, the future man feels himself as if he was already present in the Earthly aeon but was not fully conscious. But the interesting thing is that that man lived in whole groups of human beings, (...)

Practically, at this moment, everything we do, feel and think has significance not only for our Earthly aeon worldline. Instead, we’re co-creating the man of the future. This is a collective work. As a rough analogy, the different existences of different Earthly ensouled beings, form something like unique spiritual organs of the future man.

It is necessary that we conceive of this higher man, as something that exists even at this moment in its germinal beginnings. But more importantly, we have to conceive of that being as something independent from our human-scale sense of self. It penetrates our being, we share one essence, it secretly attracts our becoming, yet there’s no strict one-to-one correspondence between our sense of “I”-unit and that of the higher man. The reason is that this being lives in other souls too.

is the same idea as the one exposed here, to explain what personal perspective means in higher cognition:

You transform through these ideal states and understand that your colleagues are also present in this structure. They also work on the same problem. The problem is the Cosmic Puzzle. It’s not simply that we’re ‘here’ and think about the puzzle ‘there’ on the laboratory table but our own being is part of the structure of the puzzle, thus thinking about the problem is in itself movement of its parts. When the colleagues think, this is movement of the parts too. So it’s not just a mental task, it’s rather as if we have to dance together, except that every movement is also meaningful, just like the movements of the larynx are expressions of meaning. Like in a choir that we don't see, we can't say one colleague is here, another is there – we live in the meaningful interference of voices – this is the structure of reality. They sound from every point in space, so to speak. The 'theory' that we feel ourselves to be, would never exist as such, if those other voices were not sounding. They give us our ideal structure and we sound back into theirs. We're like communicating vessels,we have to dance together in order to develop our theory.

In this sense, our whole being is experienced as this 'theory' that grows and which tries to encompass, to become the solution of the Cosmic Puzzle. This is why we speak of a unique perspective within this infinite ideal world. The way our solution-being develops is only one of infinitely many possible.

Is that 'theory' the future man?

[AshvinP]

Mars men are the human-level beings whose soul nature is dominated by the Mars forces. Part of these forces are related to individualization and dominance. It's for this reason that the ancients understood the Mars sphere as the God of war. The Mars and all other sphere's forces live in the Earthly man too. We are a cross-section of the spheres, so to speak.

That's right, in Hindu and Buddhist traditions these are the realms of so-called Asuras - the souls whose psychic forces are related to wrath, pride and envy.

Eugene,

It's difficult for me to pinpoint how you are understanding these realms and beings and forces at this juncture. There were quite a few critical points raised by the living details provided, which it seems you have declined to consider, since you didn't really address them. (perhaps you are still working on another post - I'm not sure). Needless to say, the only reason to bring in these details was to highlight those critical points and see if they were understood.

I am just going to summarize a few of these points with some relevant quotes from Steiner. If you have any thoughts to share, it would be interesting to hear them.

- The Earthly human being, as we currently experience our body-soul-spirit existence, is a 'cross-section' of all the nested planetary spheres (including Sun and Moon). We are not only stellar beings in theory or after death, but also during our Earthly incarnation and the stellar influences can be located precisely in our WFT experiences. All of these higher nested rhythms of stellar activity are imaged simultaneously in our physical organism. 
(we don't exist as 'soul-atoms' which are completely on the physical Earth during incarnation)

After all, if we regard a human being merely from the outside, it does not matter whether we investigate his outer skin or his insides. What lies inside the human skin is not that which anatomists discover in an external way, but what lies inside the human skin are whole worlds. In the human lung, for instance, in every human organ, whole universes are compressed to miniature forms.

We see marvelous sights when admiring a beautiful landscape; marvelous sights when admiring at night the starry sky in all its splendor. Yet if viewing a human lung, a human liver, not with the anatomist's physical eye, but with the eye of the spirit, we see whole worlds compressed into a small space. Apart from the splendor and glory of all the rivers and mountains on the surface of the earth, a still more exalted splendor adorns what lies inside of man's skin, even in its merely physical aspect. It is irrelevant that all this is of smaller scale than the seemingly vast world of space. If you survey what lies in a single pulmonary vesicle, it will appear as more grandiose than the whole range of the mighty Alps. For what lies inside of man is the whole spiritual cosmos in condensed form. In man's inner organism we have an image of the entire cosmos.

- The psychic and spiritual forces associated with the spheres of Moon, Venus, Mercury, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn are all to be found within Earthly man as well. We don't need to rely on ancient traditions or mythologies to elucidate these forces, but can know them directly, through higher cognition, as they manifest within our consciousness and make sense of our whole stream of becoming.Then we can return to the ancient traditions and discern exactly how they are confirmed by living inner experience, since they were drawing on that same imaginative and inspired experience. 
(we journey more consciously through these planetary spheres between death-rebirth)

- Our ability to remain conscious and work together with other human-level souls and beings of the higher hierarchies during our journey through the spheres is tied to how much we attune our consciousness with the thoughts, feelings, and will impulses connected with their activity during our Earthly incarnation. If we don't start on this work of building resonance now, then we will just have to work that much harder to extract the same lessons in our next incarnation. Until we learn the lessons, we continue to recapitulate very similar lines of soul-development in every incarnation, giving us repeated opportunities to move on to truly novel stages of development. 

In earlier lectures we have heard that the imperishable part of the human being which at death leaves the physical body and, to a considerable extent, the etheric body too, passes through a life between death and the new birth, and that during this period its forces are drawn from the world of the stars. We have also heard how the human being is able to draw these forces from the world of stars to the extent to which he developed moral and religious qualities during his life on Earth. It was said that, for example, from the region which receives forces radiated from the planet known in occult science as Mercury, a man will be able to draw the requisite forces if, during his life on Earth before death, he developed a genuinely moral disposition; from the Venus region he can draw the forces he needs for his further life in the spiritual worlds, also for his subsequent life on Earth, if he developed a truly religious attitude before his death.

- The Christ event marked a fundamental inversion, a polar reversal, in the course of Earthly evolution, which was previously tending to more and more decoherence in the mineral spectrum through egoism (so the Christ being did not descend to simply provide a series of teachings about transcending the ego to Oneness, but to practically transfigure the Earth substance and human soul capacities through his sacrificial deed of Love, so that the Earthly evolution could be redeemed through the ego and future 'Angelic-man' and stages beyond could be concretely realized for the benefit of the Cosmic whole.)

What is it therefore that comes to pass in human evolution? Christ and Lucifer, the one as a cosmic god and the other as a god within the human soul, dwelt side by side in ancient times, one to be found in the upper regions and the other in the nether regions; then the evolution of the world progressed and for some time it was known that Dionysos or Lucifer, was far away from the earth; on the other hand the cosmic Christ was felt to be penetrating the earth to a greater and greater degree; Lucifer again became visible, and was once more able to be known. The paths taken by these two divine spiritual beings may be pictured more or less in the following way: they approached the earth from two different sides; Lucifer became invisible at the time when his path cut across that of the Christ — his light was overpowered by the Christ light. The Christ entered the human soul, became the planetary spirit of the earth, growing more and more to be the mystical Christ within human souls, and can be felt and realised through inner experiences. In this way the soul becomes gradually more capable of again beholding the other being, who took the reverse way, from within to without. Lucifer, from a being within man's inner nature, a purely earthly being such as he was when he was sought in the mysteries leading to the underworld, becomes a cosmic god. He will appear in ever-greater radiance in the outer world which we behold when we look through the tapestry of the sense world. Man's vision will become reversed. In the past Lucifer was seen behind the veil of the inner soul world, and the Christ, as by Zarathustra, behind the veil of the sense-world, but in the future the Christ will to an ever greater degree be realised by inner spiritual meditation and Lucifer will be found when the gaze is directed outwards into cosmic regions. Thus we have to record a complete reversal of the conditions by which man can acquire knowledge in the course of human evolution. The Christ, an erstwhile cosmic god, has become an earthly god, who is henceforth the soul of the earth; Lucifer, an erstwhile earthly god, has become a cosmic god.

[lorenzop]

I'd like to ask you, what makes you sure that this thread is a battle of semantics, and not a debate about the true nature of reality? Do you mean that the exact nature of reality doesn't really matter, or that reality is undefined, or that it is maybe defined but beyond our possibility to understand, or something else?
What do you mean? What keeps you interested in this forum?

Lot's of questions . . .

re what is the nature of reality, ask me again next year I may have a slightly different answer, however, a common idea in my answers would be:
1) we can best detail\describe the nature of reality by saying what reality is not ( not hot, cold, not a particle(s), not waves, not male, not female, etc.) After we've listed all possible attribute\properties of what reality is not, what we are left with, is what it is.

I assume this debate is of semantics because I assume all folks here in this thread have little to no idea of what they are talking about . . . except as provisional definitions. For example the word 'soul' . . . I don't use the word because I do not know except as a provisional definition what the word 'soul' refers to, and as far as I know, everyone here is a random internet personality with no 'spiritual expertise', I doubt anyone here understands or uses the word 'soul' in any kind of a experiential\knowledgable way. Thus I think most conversations here are contributors talking past each other.

I'm here because it's still the best show on the internet.

[Cleric K]

One thing I am confused about is whether Cleric's description of the future man:
is the same idea as the one exposed here, to explain what personal perspective means in higher cognition:

Is that 'theory' the future man?

In certain sense yes but we have to find the right relations. First we have to remember that what we do in the 'now' is not absolutely free act but is dependent on the 'riverbed', on our whole past development. We can think today in the way we do only because our brain and subtler organs have reached the state they are now. Both on a larger evolutionary and on smaller current life scale. For example, if we haven't learned language, if we haven't read some books and so on, we wouldn't be thinking and writing here. Similarly, what we do now shapes the potential that we'll be able to realize in the future, like studying today shapes the kind of work we'll be doing years from now.

Second, we have to remember that these developments follow rhythmic patterns. There's no better image for this than the seed. Most difficulties when we reflect on these things come if we imagine monotonically expanding consciousness. Then sooner or later we'll stumble at unsolvable paradoxes when we have to solve the problem of the one and the many. We'll wonder how would it feel like to be a well defined self with personal memory, which then merges into a larger whole, which no longer feels to be only 'me'.

The solution comes easy when we understand that all development happens into rhythmic cycles of growth and dissolution. In this sense, the theory that we develop is like a seed. Not a seed in an external sense but more like the seed of our (collective) Karma. We don't create that seed singlehandedly. In a certain sense the potential for that seed already exists as an archetypal attractor, part of the fractal 'matrix' of our Cosmic context, but we have to lead our becoming towards its realization. Then much like in the Conformal Cycling Universe, the next aeon will emerge from the seed of Karma and the future man will evolve anew but in more spiritual form, from the conditions that we today prepare.

Things are much more interconnected that we're willing to imagine. That's why it's completely erroneous not to consider the future as Eugene suggests. The future is not simply a point along the time axis that lies so far away that it's pointless to even think about it. This kind of thinking is influenced by our materialistic world conception which sees reality as a chaotic stage, where small changes today can have great and quite unpredictable consequences in the future (the famous butterfly effect). Thus we imagine the future similarly to weather patterns which are highly chaotic. We can barely forecast the weather for few weeks from now, what's left for millennia from now. Thus from our intellectual-bound perspective we say that it's too early to discuss the future because it's completely unpredictable. This however doesn't take into account what can only higher consciousness perceive - that the Time potential has structure and certain events in the far far future are even more certain than the weather tomorrow. We can only understand this if we conceive of the superimposed rhythmic waves of the spiritual potential, where the higher order archetypal rhythms shape the evolutionary envelope (the telos) for the lower.

Yet the way this envelope will be filled with manifested potential still has lots of degrees of freedom. Everything that we do today already affects the future. For example, Steiner has described how everything that we have developed as technological thinking today, which seems completely mechanistic and existing only in our minds, in fact is related with elemental forces which also act like seeds and will emerge on future Jupiter in a more spiritual form. In fact, he describes how this whole intellectual web that we weave will form an independent kingdom of spider-like beings. And these things were said way before computers were invented. Today, even in the mechanical intellect we can already see how we have spawned a whole world of connected machines. Today the thoughts that create these machines live only in the human heads and are manifested through the will but the ideas that we manifest have concrete spiritual existence. On Jupiter, where reality will be much more Imaginative, these ideas will manifest as independent kingdoms. This can be sensed even today by programmers like me, who can be haunted by software bugs in dreams

So the key to the question lies in our ability to distinguish between our monotonic becoming and the fact that what we do acts as seeds for the future forms. In this sense it is true that the 'theory' is the future man but on the other hand we won't simply become that future man by directly becoming the theory. We'll first have to die and then be resurrected in the new world, even though, as I wrote previously, at that future state there won't be one-to-one correspondence between an "I" of the future man and the "I" of Federica in our present world.

[Cleric K]

I assume this debate is of semantics because I assume all folks here in this thread have little to no idea of what they are talking about . . . except as provisional definitions. For example the word 'soul' . . . I don't use the word because I do not know except as a provisional definition what the word 'soul' refers to, and as far as I know, everyone here is a random internet personality with no 'spiritual expertise', I doubt anyone here understands or uses the word 'soul' in any kind of a experiential\knowledgable way. Thus I think most conversations here are contributors talking past each other.

The real question is whether you have some faith that you can reach the experiential knowledge that gives concrete reality to the 'soul'? And even more importantly, whether you at all want/feel the need to have such knowledge? Because if you don't have interest in such knowledge (or you believe that the soul is unknowable or even doesn't exist at all) then it makes absolutely no difference for you even if everyone here had true experiential knowledge of it. In fact, I presented similar situation to you some time ago with a joke:

A rabbit comes into the bakery, and asks the baker "Do you have any carrot cake?". The baker is quite surprised, but has to respond "no". The rabbit leaves the store. The next day, the rabbit returns, and asks the baker "Do you sell carrot cake now?", but the baker again has to say "no". After the rabbit leaves the baker feels kind of guilty that he can't sell the rabbit a carrot cake. He looks up the recipe for carrot cake, buys the needed ingredients and bakes one.
The next day, the rabbit returns and again asks the baker for carrot cake. The baker answers "Yes, I do!" with glee, happy to finally help this customer out. To this the rabbit answers "Disgusting, isn't it?"

So the real question is whether you have interest to go into these deep questions and earnestly seek that experiential knowledge but you simply don't think that this forum is the place that will help you out OR you don't at all care about such questions but simply enjoy the show here.

[AshvinP]

I'd like to ask you, what makes you sure that this thread is a battle of semantics, and not a debate about the true nature of reality? Do you mean that the exact nature of reality doesn't really matter, or that reality is undefined, or that it is maybe defined but beyond our possibility to understand, or something else?
What do you mean? What keeps you interested in this forum?

Lot's of questions . . .

re what is the nature of reality, ask me again next year I may have a slightly different answer, however, a common idea in my answers would be:
1) we can best detail\describe the nature of reality by saying what reality is not ( not hot, cold, not a particle(s), not waves, not male, not female, etc.) After we've listed all possible attribute\properties of what reality is not, what we are left with, is what it is.

I assume this debate is of semantics because I assume all folks here in this thread have little to no idea of what they are talking about . . . except as provisional definitions. For example the word 'soul' . . . I don't use the word because I do not know except as a provisional definition what the word 'soul' refers to, and as far as I know, everyone here is a random internet personality with no 'spiritual expertise', I doubt anyone here understands or uses the word 'soul' in any kind of a experiential\knowledgable way. Thus I think most conversations here are contributors talking past each other.

I'm here because it's still the best show on the internet.

Another consideration here. When you experience fear, certain objective processes unfold in your physiology. The blood starts flowing back inwards, you turn pale, etc. These objective and verifiable processes unfold even if you are completely unaware of that which causes the fear, or perhaps even unaware of the feeling of fear itself. The experiences of feelings, desires, emotions, pain, etc. are all soul-experiences. It is well known that most of these experiences unfold well below the threshold of normal waking cosnciousness, since we can't fit most of them into our normal sense-based conceptual slots. They will continue to unfold whether you choose to expand/refine those slots or not. Whether you use the word 'soul' or not, won't change what's actually taking place in the soul and body. The latter don't care about your definitions or lack of definitions. The longer we refuse to bring our soul-experiences into consciousness, the more fear will run its objective course below our waking threshold and condition our organism. Because it is precisely a positive living and experiential knowledge of these processes which transmutes the fear into courage and hope. The negative psychological approach of lumping all these things into the 'unconscious' (what reality is not) and thereby washing our hands of them, only makes the subconscious conditioning grow larger and more intense. Then we enter a negative feedback process where life events and existential feelings only grow more perplexing, more fearful, more resentful. Eventually, across the threshold of death, we will awaken from this process and realize how much suffering/anguish and objectively destructive effects could have been spared if we had taken more interest in unearthing the subconscious during life.