AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri May 19, 2023 11:56 am
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Cleric K wrote: ↑Fri May 19, 2023 3:39 pm
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Cleric, Ashvin,
I'll try to point out with new words the discrepancy I see between your shared vision of freedom and the anthroposophical idea of freedom as spiritual activity. My current best way to articulate it is:
Freedom, or free will, is the outpouring of knowledge - truth of reality made true by love - flowing through the prism of individual agency, and so becoming timely enterprise. By “timely” I mean 'having a time quality'. Agency means individuality ready to act. I remember this word from Leyfs essay, and it fits perfectly here. So, Cleric, freedom for me is
only, and
rigorously, "freedom to". My brain is on the brink of falling off of my skull, asking me permission to suicide, when I try to figure out how thankyou you could come to the conclusion that I have been more engaged with "freedom from”.
As I see it, “freedom from” is the exoteric idea of freedom connected with temptation, that you both have showed adhesion to. It reminds me of that old hit, that you may be too young to remember: “Freed from desire - mind and senses purified - freed from desire - na-na na-na na-na-na na-na-na na-na”. Voilà. That’s about it, for the meaning of “freedom from”.
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?
In
Max Leyfs words:
how could it ever be factually discerned whether I or someone else “could have done otherwise” when any presumptive evidence could only ever be, in principle, counterfactual, if not by appeal to my own intuitive experience of agency? And if I have finally apprehended the latter, why should I need any ulterior justification for the reality of free will?
In Steiner's words:
The impulse toward conduct lies, not without us [temptations, more than one way to do things, ... ], but within us. (...)
Our philosophy is, therefore, in the highest sense a philosophy of freedom. It shows first theoretically how every force which controls the world from without must fall away in order to make man his own master.
Of course I don’t disregard the “opposing forces of evolution”. I don’t “avoid Lucifer-Ahriman”. The knowledge of these forces is part of the inflow that hits the prism of our free agency. But these forces challenge our understanding, not our conduct. If they challenge our conduct, it’s because we have capitulated against them first in our understanding.
What these rebellious beings manifest with their rebellion, is
not freedom, but lack of freedom. They were led to rebel by their insufficient free development, which didn’t let them have the full view that’s required to do the right thing. There is only one engine of reality, and we express freedom as an effortful intention to steer our becoming as a result of a merger with it (true reality). Again, in anthroposophical sense, how could freedom have anything to do with executive choices, alternative ways to do things, or arising temptations?
Ashvin wrote:Temptation arises exactly because each new stage of free spiritual activity comes with a corresponding degree of creative responsibility for exercising that spiritual activity.
This needs to be turned around: as spiritual activity expands, and responsibility proportionally expands, temptation diminishes. Temptation never “arises”. It can only diminish, as it is turned inside out. Because what is temptation?
It’s the flip side of knowledge at every stage, the wisdom that we still lack, the love that has not yet touched us, and we turn it inside out by learning, including from our errors. As we evolve our individual perspective, temptation never “arises”. It starts from being the immersive medium of life itself. Then, through spiritual development, it progressively dissolves, through the expansion of knowledge. This applies at every step of development. We decode ignorance into knowledge, and freedom consists of such spiritual activity impressed in the flow of becoming with the stamp of our individual agency. It can only go in this direction, from ignorance to knowledge. If the work is not done, ignorance and temtaption remain, and we fall into them. For the fallen angels I guess it’s the same. They followed a deceptive course of action while truth was obscured from their sight.
Ashvin wrote:To be clear, our experience of error or temptation should not be projected up into the spirit worlds.
Error and temptation are two very different things. Only when neglecting the time dimension of freedom, they land on the same platter. Error is recorded in our memory and we can build on it. Temptation is...
an hypothesis.
Ashvin wrote:What we experience as those things when expressed in the fourth Earthly convolution is something of a vastly different nature when expressed in the higher worlds. But, at the same time, our failure to comprehend that higher expression should not cause us to reach premature judgments as to the absolute nature of 'freedom' and to marginalize all facets which don't seem to immediately fit into those judgments.
Well... the judgment contained in this statement is irrefutably more real than the one it claims to expose. It’s true that I don’t have a clear idea, only an intuition, of what freedom will be made of for future man. It was the starting point of this whole conversation. However, I do have a clear enough idea of what freedom is now, and this idea is far from “absolute”. The effortful, continuous work of transmuting the inflow of knowledge into the right outflow of glyphs, through the individual prism of our agency, can only happen as trial and error progression. Quite exactly the contrary of absolute, abstract freedom.