Meditation exercise on "separate me"

[Cleric K]

I get your point, that, if we intend freedom in the common sense of having a variety of alternative courses of action to choose from, then evolution to higher stages may seem to imply a loss of freedom. Then I don't understand your conclusion on what freedom beyond earthly life could be made of:

My guess is that freedom at that stage will be connected with the fact that within the volume of potential which would result in a healthy unfoldment, there are nevertheless very many different possibilities which could be mutually exclusive and there's no 'right' or 'best' (besides following the general attractor). Thus a spiritual being still makes creative choices and pursues some direction.

because you still seem to refer to the common idea of freedom (many possibilities to choose from in the volume of potential)?

Maybe the thing that puts these two apart is that in the common sense, freedom is generally considered as something personal. For example, the freedom to choose on which island I'll go on vacation. My guess about the future stage is that we more or less grasp the general trend of development, yet this doesn't in itself do the work that has to be done through our Earth-level selves. For example, through higher cognition we may find out that the water level in the room is rising and soon will reach the ceiling. Then we have to utilize our freedom to find the creative solutions to the situation. Just like any engineering task, there might not be one best solution. For example, if we have to build a bridge, there are various possible designs. Yet once we start building one, we have made a creative choice and will have to live with all its further consequences.

So I think that in the future, human beings will be more aware of the general direction of world development and freedom will consist in the creative freedom to find the solutions for that development. Maybe this is a good way to think about it: world development is not something that we can simply let go and allow it to manifest through us. Instead, it faces us as a Cosmic riddle. We understand it's general 'geometry', we have some idea where things should go but in a way that world development has to be created by us (at least the part that we're responsible for). This is so even in our personal meditation. Because of our sensory habits it's very natural to imagine that to see the spiritual world is like seeing in some space that other beings look into too and that we all see the same thing. Then we may say for example "I want to see the Jupiter and Venus conditions too." But, I hope this won't be misunderstood, in a certain sense we have to invent the spiritual world. What we'll experience in the spiritual world is not some spiritual tables and chairs that every being perceives in the same way and we're just the next one who has laid their sight on them. Instead, we encounter an experience that no other being has ever experienced in the exactly same way. Not only that but even our consecutive visits in higher consciousness are never the same. For this reason it's actually detrimental if we meditate with the intent "to experience that thing which I experienced last time". This may indeed happen but it will not be exactly the same. The planets have moved a little, it's not the same world anymore and everything has its significance in the higher worlds.

I'm sorry that I'll give the following example but it might be relatable to some. Those who have experience with cannabis might know (depending on how much introspection they have thrown into it) that the experience doesn't force itself in the same way in which, for example, alcohol does. That's also the reason why some people don't feel any effect in their first attempts. In a certain sense we have to invent the 'high' state. We need to learn to be high. We have to allow ourselves to grow into a new version of our ego - our 'high' ego. The greater our imagination about what that high ego can do and experience, the more the experience unfolds in new and unfamiliar territories. The downside of course is that this high ego can never be truly free because it depends on certain entanglement with the bodily complex and its interaction with plant substances (which are of course all elemental spiritual beings). But other than that, in our spiritual development we also have to continually discover new and unfamiliar aspects of the ego. We have to invent our way to the higher being. This of course doesn't mean that we single handedly do that. It's still an interaction, it's inspiration, it's a gift through grace, yet when it happens it's like the ego invents/discovers new 'feelers' through which it grows in unfamiliar territories.

[Federica]

Maybe the thing that puts these two apart is that in the common sense, freedom is generally considered as something personal. For example, the freedom to choose on which island I'll go on vacation. My guess about the future stage is that we more or less grasp the general trend of development, yet this doesn't in itself do the work that has to be done through our Earth-level selves. For example, through higher cognition we may find out that the water level in the room is rising and soon will reach the ceiling. Then we have to utilize our freedom to find the creative solutions to the situation. Just like any engineering task, there might not be one best solution. For example, if we have to build a bridge, there are various possible designs. Yet once we start building one, we have made a creative choice and will have to live with all its further consequences.

So I think that in the future, human beings will be more aware of the general direction of world development and freedom will consist in the creative freedom to find the solutions for that development. Maybe this is a good way to think about it: world development is not something that we can simply let go and allow it to manifest through us. Instead, it faces us as a Cosmic riddle. We understand it's general 'geometry', we have some idea where things should go but in a way that world development has to be created by us (at least the part that we're responsible for). This is so even in our personal meditation. Because of our sensory habits it's very natural to imagine that to see the spiritual world is like seeing in some space that other beings look into too and that we all see the same thing. Then we may say for example "I want to see the Jupiter and Venus conditions too." But, I hope this won't be misunderstood, in a certain sense we have to invent the spiritual world. What we'll experience in the spiritual world is not some spiritual tables and chairs that every being perceives in the same way and we're just the next one who has laid their sight on them. Instead, we encounter an experience that no other being has ever experienced in the exactly same way. Not only that but even our consecutive visits in higher consciousness are never the same. For this reason it's actually detrimental if we meditate with the intent "to experience that thing which I experienced last time". This may indeed happen but it will not be exactly the same. The planets have moved a little, it's not the same world anymore and everything has its significance in the higher worlds.

I'm sorry that I'll give the following example but it might be relatable to some. Those who have experience with cannabis might know (depending on how much introspection they have thrown into it) that the experience doesn't force itself in the same way in which, for example, alcohol does. That's also the reason why some people don't feel any effect in their first attempts. In a certain sense we have to invent the 'high' state. We need to learn to be high. We have to allow ourselves to grow into a new version of our ego - our 'high' ego. The greater our imagination about what that high ego can do and experience, the more the experience unfolds in new and unfamiliar territories. The downside of course is that this high ego can never be truly free because it depends on certain entanglement with the bodily complex and its interaction with plant substances (which are of course all elemental spiritual beings). But other than that, in our spiritual development we also have to continually discover new and unfamiliar aspects of the ego. We have to invent our way to the higher being. This of course doesn't mean that we single handedly do that. It's still an interaction, it's inspiration, it's a gift through grace, yet when it happens it's like the ego invents/discovers new 'feelers' through which it grows in unfamiliar territories.

Cleric,

As I see it, your whole post doesn’t hold up. I am sorry to say that, and I am struggling with that, but I owe you an honest reply - and much more, by the way. Hopefully I’m writing from the unexplored place of my sympathies, antipathies, and all that, and I'm wrong. And I apologize for the disagreement I am expressing here, should this turn out to be the case. But clearly, that’s not my best understanding right now, otherwise I wouldn’t write this.

To me, the above illustrations of freedom are far-fetched, to say the least, from the example of the room about to sink underwater, that one should solve for, in freedom, by choosing one bridge design and not another, to the supposed freedom granted by intoxication of the physical body with drugs/elementals. While, one could argue, the first example is simply odd, and stuck in the conventional approach to freedom, I can’t find any possible way to not revolt against the second. It’s to no avail that you add, about the ‘freedom’ felt by the ego on a drug-assisted high:

The downside of course is that this high ego can never be truly free because it depends on certain entanglement with the bodily complex and its interaction with plant substances

This doesn’t hold up. The reason why the “high ego can never be truly free” is not because it depends on entanglement with bodily complex and interaction with plant substances. It’s not the ins and outs of a given situation that make free or unfree the choice that led us into it. Instead, the reason why that high-ego is not free is that it didn’t get a chance to know and make contact with enough of true reality to be able to freely differentiate between unchosen desires, and the goals and motives that align with Truth, Love and Wisdom, and then will those. Therefore, that ego unfreely indexed, or submitted, its will to naturally emerging, unchosen desires, rather than doing the work against nature that discloses the wide-spanning intents of the True self, and consequently, the course of action that aligns with them, and supports them. So, the freedom the “high ego” lives in, during the intoxicated state is a limited, highly constrained world, maybe like a room sinking underwater. In any case, it’s an illusion.

And picking up such an example as a support to understand the creative and inventive nature of spiritual freedom, is, in my view, inappropriate. It resorts to using the bottom to take aback the top. It comes down to an attempt to force the lower nature into ruling over the higher, and the higher into constriction within the curvature of the lower, by a temporary trick. To me, this cannot be in any sense a righteous example of freedom. Quite exactly, it’s an example of its opposite, be it in spiritual sense, in PoF sense, and also in the most common sense.


But even if we abstain from looking into the weirdness of these examples, now zooming out of these, basically your idea of what freedom will be for the future man seems to boil down to “future man will have to live and do things”:

So I think that in the future, human beings will be more aware of the general direction of world development and freedom will consist in the creative freedom to find the solutions for that development.

But this is a tautology. This can’t be a vision of freedom. The problem in this sentence is: having said that, we have said nothing. Of course man will have to live and act. Future man will have things to do, and that won’t happen in a random way, but along the trajectory of some intents. Yes. Even today this is the case. But how can this express any meaningful characterization of freedom? What's going on here, Cleric?

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

As I see it, your whole post doesn’t hold up. I am sorry to say that, and I am struggling with that, but I owe you an honest reply - and much more, by the way. Hopefully I’m writing from the unexplored place of my sympathies, antipathies, and all that, and I'm wrong. And I apologize for the disagreement I am expressing here, should this turn out to be the case. But clearly, that’s not my best understanding right now, otherwise I wouldn’t write this.

To me, the above illustrations of freedom are far-fetched, to say the least, from the example of the room about to sink underwater, that one should solve for, in freedom, by choosing one bridge design and not another, to the supposed freedom granted by intoxication of the physical body with drugs/elementals. While, one could argue, the first example is simply odd, and stuck in the conventional approach to freedom, I can’t find any possible way to not revolt against the second. It’s to no avail that you add, about the ‘freedom’ felt by the ego on a drug-assisted high:

The downside of course is that this high ego can never be truly free because it depends on certain entanglement with the bodily complex and its interaction with plant substances

This doesn’t hold up. The reason why the “high ego can never be truly free” is not because it depends on entanglement with bodily complex and interaction with plant substances. It’s not the ins and outs of a given situation that make free or unfree the choice that led us into it. Instead, the reason why that high-ego is not free is that it didn’t get a chance to know and make contact with enough of true reality to be able to freely differentiate between unchosen desires, and the goals and motives that align with Truth, Love and Wisdom, and then will those. Therefore, that ego unfreely indexed, or submitted, its will to naturally emerging, unchosen desires, rather than doing the work against nature that discloses the wide-spanning intents of the True self, and consequently, the course of action that aligns with them, and supports them. So, the freedom the “high ego” lives in, during the intoxicated state is a limited, highly constrained world, maybe like a room sinking underwater. In any case, it’s an illusion.

And picking up such an example as a support to understand the creative and inventive nature of spiritual freedom, is, in my view, inappropriate. It resorts to using the bottom to take aback the top. It comes down to an attempt to force the lower nature into ruling over the higher, and the higher into constriction within the curvature of the lower, by a temporary trick. To me, this cannot be in any sense a righteous example of freedom. Quite exactly, it’s an example of its opposite, be it in spiritual sense, in PoF sense, and also in the most common sense.


But even if we abstain from looking into the weirdness of these examples, now zooming out of these, basically your idea of what freedom will be for the future man seems to boil down to “future man will have to live and do things”:

So I think that in the future, human beings will be more aware of the general direction of world development and freedom will consist in the creative freedom to find the solutions for that development.

But this is a tautology. This can’t be a vision of freedom. The problem in this sentence is: having said that, we have said nothing. Of course man will have to live and act. Future man will have things to do, and that won’t happen in a random way, but along the trajectory of some intents. Yes. Even today this is the case. But how can this express any meaningful characterization of freedom? What's going on here, Cleric?

What I try to say is very simple really.

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?

It all boils down to grasping the contextual structure of be-ing. The point was that God's will doesn't come to us as a grocery list for the day but as a creative task that descends from above down (or we may say from the future) that we have to solve from below up. As said previously, this shouldn't be mistaken for the lower ruling over the higher. Instead, the lower continually tries to accommodate the higher. The thing however is that just opening up for the higher - even though a necessary first step - is not enough. With this we can open up for inspiration for work but still the work itself goes through our "I" in freedom. It's like in art.

Disregarding the previous objections about the tautology and the drugs, is this the above idea clear?

[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.

[Federica]

Cleric,

As I see it, your whole post doesn’t hold up. I am sorry to say that, and I am struggling with that, but I owe you an honest reply - and much more, by the way. Hopefully I’m writing from the unexplored place of my sympathies, antipathies, and all that, and I'm wrong. And I apologize for the disagreement I am expressing here, should this turn out to be the case. But clearly, that’s not my best understanding right now, otherwise I wouldn’t write this.

To me, the above illustrations of freedom are far-fetched, to say the least, from the example of the room about to sink underwater, that one should solve for, in freedom, by choosing one bridge design and not another, to the supposed freedom granted by intoxication of the physical body with drugs/elementals. While, one could argue, the first example is simply odd, and stuck in the conventional approach to freedom, I can’t find any possible way to not revolt against the second. It’s to no avail that you add, about the ‘freedom’ felt by the ego on a drug-assisted high:

The downside of course is that this high ego can never be truly free because it depends on certain entanglement with the bodily complex and its interaction with plant substances

This doesn’t hold up. The reason why the “high ego can never be truly free” is not because it depends on entanglement with bodily complex and interaction with plant substances. It’s not the ins and outs of a given situation that make free or unfree the choice that led us into it. Instead, the reason why that high-ego is not free is that it didn’t get a chance to know and make contact with enough of true reality to be able to freely differentiate between unchosen desires, and the goals and motives that align with Truth, Love and Wisdom, and then will those. Therefore, that ego unfreely indexed, or submitted, its will to naturally emerging, unchosen desires, rather than doing the work against nature that discloses the wide-spanning intents of the True self, and consequently, the course of action that aligns with them, and supports them. So, the freedom the “high ego” lives in, during the intoxicated state is a limited, highly constrained world, maybe like a room sinking underwater. In any case, it’s an illusion.

And picking up such an example as a support to understand the creative and inventive nature of spiritual freedom, is, in my view, inappropriate. It resorts to using the bottom to take aback the top. It comes down to an attempt to force the lower nature into ruling over the higher, and the higher into constriction within the curvature of the lower, by a temporary trick. To me, this cannot be in any sense a righteous example of freedom. Quite exactly, it’s an example of its opposite, be it in spiritual sense, in PoF sense, and also in the most common sense.


But even if we abstain from looking into the weirdness of these examples, now zooming out of these, basically your idea of what freedom will be for the future man seems to boil down to “future man will have to live and do things”:

So I think that in the future, human beings will be more aware of the general direction of world development and freedom will consist in the creative freedom to find the solutions for that development.

But this is a tautology. This can’t be a vision of freedom. The problem in this sentence is: having said that, we have said nothing. Of course man will have to live and act. Future man will have things to do, and that won’t happen in a random way, but along the trajectory of some intents. Yes. Even today this is the case. But how can this express any meaningful characterization of freedom? What's going on here, Cleric?

What I try to say is very simple really.

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?

It all boils down to grasping the contextual structure of be-ing. The point was that God's will doesn't come to us as a grocery list for the day but as a creative task that descends from above down (or we may say from the future) that we have to solve from below up. As said previously, this shouldn't be mistaken for the lower ruling over the higher. Instead, the lower continually tries to accommodate the higher. The thing however is that just opening up for the higher - even though a necessary first step - is not enough. With this we can open up for inspiration for work but still the work itself goes through our "I" in freedom. It's like in art.

Disregarding the previous objections about the tautology and the drugs, is this the above idea clear?

*******

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?"

No, you don't. This is incorrect. You are forcing on me “one of the most common objections”, what you think the average person should think and feel, although I didn’t say that, at all. I already clearly pushed back this interpretation a few posts above. To which, you were “sorry about that” but at the same time, as it were, you didn’t take me seriously, and you got back to your initial idea. So for reference:


My initial question:

I imagine, freedom means what it means to us today because of our physical extension. It is to be realized as it is, in the context of the physical Earth. As outrageous as it might sound, it probably shouldn’t be... idolized? If so, what will it be like to will an imaginative organic function of future man? How will the ideal form to be ful-filled by the organ, act as riverbed of organic activity? Maybe, at the imaginative organ-level, freedom will mean nothing other than perfectly dwelling in God’s will…

In response to which, you went to explain all the wrong ways to think about future man. For example you said: “we shouldn’t imagine that to do God’s will means to get stuck in some organ’s position (one will be stuck in the toe, another in the ear and so on) and perform some tedious tasks”. I assured you I was not thinking in terms of toes and ears - thanks to using some of your older images by the way - and I pushed back your idea:

I was not putting a grid of tayloristic task execution on the meaning of ‘realizing God’s will’ in future eons. I was only expressing my current inability to fill the ideal question "what is freedom beyond Earthly life made of” with clear meaning and, with it, the intuition that possibly our freedom in God's will would happen less in fits and starts than it does today, amidst the rough pulling and pushing relayed and amplified by the sensory spectrum.

Your replied:

So it seems in this case I got carried away explaining things that you already take into account. Sorry about that

But now it seems you got back to fully overboard, again…

Disregarding the previous objections about the tautology and the drugs, is this the above idea clear?

Sure, we can disregard all that I pointed out in my post above, regarding your idea of freedom (these were not side objections, by the way, but the essence of my post) and yes, I can surely answer your off-topic question, no problem. The answer is: Yes, that idea is clear, as it was clear before. I agree and understand that “God’s will doesn’t come to us as a grocery list for the day”. And it’s surely clear to me that “this shouldn't be mistaken for the lower ruling over the higher” (this is a distorted reference to my post, unless it is a coincidence).
Do you have any more wrong things that you feel you should point out?

[Cleric K]

Sure, we can disregard all that I pointed out in my post above, regarding your idea of freedom (these were not side objections, by the way, but the essence of my post) and yes, I can surely answer your off-topic question, no problem. The answer is: Yes, that idea is clear, as it was clear before. I agree and understand that “God’s will doesn’t come to us as a grocery list for the day”. And it’s surely clear to me that “this shouldn't be mistaken for the lower ruling over the higher” (this is a distorted reference to my post, unless it is a coincidence).
Do you have any more wrong things that you feel you should point out?

OK, I'm sorry if it seemed that I was carelessly putting you into categories and pointing out things that don't apply to you. I was only spelling out some of the things which in my view can stand in the way of gaining intuition about the future life. But from what you have written so far it seems that you do already understand pretty much everything needed. In my thinking this understanding in itself should count as a quite satisfactory answer to the question. Yet the fact that you still feel that the question is not properly addressed tells me that I don't really understand what the issue is.

So we have established that higher life can be likened to an artistically-scientific process for which we understand the general direction (not as some mechanical law but as living relation with higher beings which constitute our Cosmic context), yet the details should be worked out creatively and there might be more than one way to do it. With this in mind can you identify what is it which still makes this idea unsatisfactory?

[Federica]

OK, I'm sorry if it seemed that I was carelessly putting you into categories and pointing out things that don't apply to you. I was only spelling out some of the things which in my view can stand in the way of gaining intuition about the future life. But from what you have written so far it seems that you do already understand pretty much everything needed. In my thinking this understanding in itself should count as a quite satisfactory answer to the question. Yet the fact that you still feel that the question is not properly addressed tells me that I don't really understand what the issue is.

So we have established that higher life can be likened to an artistically-scientific process for which we understand the general direction (not as some mechanical law but as living relation with higher beings which constitute our Cosmic context), yet the details should be worked out creatively and there might be more than one way to do it. With this in mind can you identify what is it which still makes this idea unsatisfactory?

Cleric, to be honest I find this exchange disturbing on more than one account. However, because this is so not consistent with everything else I've seen, I guess it's best that I try to agree it's the result of some confusion on my side and leave it at that for now.

[Federica]

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.

[Cleric K]

Cleric, to be honest I find this exchange disturbing on more than one account. However, because this is so not consistent with everything else I've seen, I guess it's best that I try to agree it's the result of some confusion on my side and leave it at that for now.

I hope you don't think that I'm doing something on purpose or just out of neglect or disrespect. I sincerely don't know what the issue is.

We know that it may often happen that we think we gasp something until we stumble on something new which contradicts our understanding. I'm fully open that my understanding of the future freedom may be of such fake kind. There might be some contradiction that you have stumbled upon which I don't even notice and that's why I don't understand why, for example, my last post is disturbing to you (which in my mind quite concretely addresses the topic). Hopefully we'll work this out.

[Federica]

I hope you don't think that I'm doing something on purpose or just out of neglect or disrespect. I sincerely don't know what the issue is.

We know that it may often happen that we think we gasp something until we stumble on something new which contradicts our understanding. I'm fully open that my understanding of the future freedom may be of such fake kind. There might be some contradiction that you have stumbled upon which I don't even notice and that's why I don't understand why, for example, my last post is disturbing to you (which in my mind quite concretely addresses the topic). Hopefully we'll work this out.

Cleric, thanks for your reply. By “exchange” I meant this whole conversation, not your last post in isolation. As I wrote just above, what I think is that I should try my best to keep in mind that my understanding is limited, and I’m not reckless enough to think that you are doing something on purpose, or to imagine that I have stumbled upon “fake” parts of your idea of present or future freedom. With this said, I would surely still be philosophically interested in understanding how you connect it with the anthroposophical idea of freedom, to the extent that, as I grasp them at this point, the two diverge. In this sense, I also still subscribe to the comments about freedom I made in the posts above. Regarding your latest question:

So we have established that higher life can be likened to an artistically-scientific process for which we understand the general direction (not as some mechanical law but as living relation with higher beings which constitute our Cosmic context), yet the details should be worked out creatively and there might be more than one way to do it. With this in mind can you identify what is it which still makes this idea unsatisfactory?

I first see the need to clarify what “we have established”. In particular I’m not sure I agree with the underlined, that to me hints to your previously exposed idea of freedom and less to the anthroposophical. The way you put it suggests again that our freedom will find expression in choosing one set of details and not another. In other words, that freedom comes from the existence of these alternative engineering choices, or artistic ones, of detailed solutions. It’s as if freedom was sprouting from the available opportunity to single out an option at every discrete instant a decision is made. But I still think this is misleading. In the same way that an incarcerated person may express more freedom than a socially integrated one who has so many more available choices to make at every moment; and that a novelist feels more inspired by creative freedom once the novel’s subject and message have materialized than before the bare white page, alternative options are out of sync with freedom. They reveal very little about its nature.

As you say, freedom is catalyzed by the future, yet when we look at the “more than one way to do things” we are not looking at the volume of potential, but at past peripheral dead ends. In this sense, from the viewpoint of its future attractor, a course of action is unaffected by the field of what could have been done alternatively, which only can be conceived in abstract retrospective (both "abstract" and "retrospective" being equally important obstacles, as I see it).

Again, I can easily conceive that the views I am expressing may result from a misunderstanding of your ideas, or the anthroposophical, or both. Still, until I am shown it is so, and how, or until I work at further improving my cognitive capabilities, I am at the point of saying that, for example, your thought that the experience of cannabis helps understand freedom because it “doesn’t force itself in the way in which alcohol does”, is flawed, insofar as it is connected with the misleading idea that freedom comes from having plethora of options to choose from. Same, as I already argued, for the idea that someone under the effect of cannabis is unfree because the perceived creativity depends on entanglement with the bodily complex.

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.