A Polar Comparison of the Buddha and the Christ

[Federica]

Eugene,

In the Steiner Archive, I liked this short intro by Thomas Poplawski to the lecture series on Luci-fer, the bearer of light, and Ahriman. I thought about you while reading it (the indigo notes are mine of course):

Thanks, that's a good read. I agree that earthly and heavenly gravitational poles are one example of the polarities fueling the evolution of humanity. But notice that they both exist withing the framework of the dualistic state of consciousness.

THE INFLUENCES OF LUCIFER AND AHRIMAN
In Rudolf Steiner's sculpture, a strong figure stands with one clenched hand upraised to the beautiful Lucifer, the other hand stretched downward to the twisted and sclerotic Ahriman. The Representative of Humanity stands heroically, holding at bay and in balance the two opposing forces, centered within the “Third Force,” that force which we recognize in ourselves in the word ‘I’.

That's right. These polarities drive the evolution of souls while they exist in the dualistic state up to the point when they become ready and mature to transcend it and realize themselves as the Cosmic "I". And it is the "Third Force" that is actually curving the evolution towards such realization. The "I"-realization transcends the earth-heaven polarity and has no particular bias towards one or the other pole.

You are right that my interpretation of Lucifer and Ahriman is somewhat different. I agree that they represent a polarity, but IMO Ahriman and Lucifer are two "faces" or "personifications" of the same force-being, the force of duality (whatever we call him, the name does not matter, I call him "Demiurge"). Greeks intuitively knew that and depicted him as a "Two-faced Janus" deity who is a mythical metaphor of any polarity being two "faces" of the same essence. It is like the same electromagnetic force acting through two opposite positive and negative charges. Note that I'm not suggesting that the Demiurgic force is "evil", it represents an inevitable but temporary stage in the evolution of souls, it promotes evolution at certain developmental stages but becomes an impediment at further transitory stages until it becomes fully transcended at more mature stages.

*******

I agree that earthly and heavenly gravitational poles are one example of the polarities fueling the evolution of humanity. But notice that they both exist within the framework of the dualistic state of consciousness.

Well, no This is a way to pull yourself out of the polarities, at least to the extent that you are able to reach and maintain the "non-dual state". Whilst in reality, the true, fully integral non-dual state can only be reached by learning to progressively work through, and not aside of, the polarities. Our communion with Oneness is to be pursued within and not without the polarities. Until the over-spiritualizing impulse is recognized and evolutionarily factored in (together with its opposite) there will remain that sense of incomplete understanding already referred to multiple times in the recent threads. Not that I have direct experience of this, of course. I am merely seeing from afar how it makes more and more sense with every further step. But yes, it's a progressive realization, it takes time and iterations, and we are all embarked on this journey!

IMO Ahriman and Lucifer are two "faces" or "personifications" of the same force-being, the force of duality (whatever we call him, the name does not matter, I call him "Demiurge"). Greeks intuitively knew that and depicted him as a "Two-faced Janus" deity who is a mythical metaphor of any polarity being two "faces" of the same essence.

I guess it can indeed be said that Lucifer and Ahriman are two faces of the same essence, depending on at what level we consider the matter. If we say that they are the two faces of the human essence, then yes we can say that. However if we say that they are two faces of an evil essence that we place outside us, and that we should endeavor to escape in order to reach Oneness, then no, this is not the case.

By the way, you are operating a very arbitrary recruitment of Janus at the service of your opinion of choice here. As I noticed before on the forum, it is common that there is some level of confusion between ancient Greek and ancient Latin cultures, and I would like to seize the opportunity to say a word about that. Not that I am an expert, still it should be said that Janus is actually not a Greek deity, or god. It's interesting - Janus is practically the only Latin god that does not come from Greek cosmogony. He is inherently Latin/Roman. Janus is the god of the beginnings, the one who has always been there, from the origins of everything. The origin of his name is associated with the meanings of beginning, entrance, passage, and door. In English, the word January, and even the word janitor come from this same root. It means the god of the initial times/spaces, and the god of the passage, or entrance. In this way we can understand the sense of his two faces, that watch over both sides of the passage. So in this sense, yes, Janus is also the god of change and transmutation, but saying that the ancient Romans intuited the two-sided nature of evil and represented them through Janus, really is arbitrary.


If I can add a last word from Steiner that gives an insight about the difference between Greek and Latin culture:

I also referred to how, in the transition from the Greek culture to the Roman-Latin culture, that is to say in the fourth Post-Atlantean period, the single sounds in language lose their names and, as in contemporary usage, merely have value as sounds. In Greek culture we still have a name for the first letter of the alphabet but in Latin it is just ‘A’. In passing from the Greek to the Latin culture something living in speech, something eminently concrete changes into abstraction. It might be said: as long as Man called the first letter of the alphabet ‘Alpha’, he experienced a certain amount of inspiration in it, but the moment he called it just ‘A’, the letters conformed to outer convention, to the prosaic aspects of life, replacing inspiration and inner experience. This constituted the actual transition from everything belonging to Greece to what is Roman-Latin — men of culture became estranged from the spiritual world of poetry and entered into the prose of life.

So the Romans made the Western world enter "into the prose of life" - that is a much more rational and material approach to existence, compared to the Greek's, prefiguring the subsequent materialist turn that developed more explicitly from the 14th century on. An outer example of this more practical and down-to-earth nature is the law system, there are many more.

[AshvinP]

Eugene,

In the Steiner Archive, I liked this short intro by Thomas Poplawski to the lecture series on Luci-fer, the bearer of light, and Ahriman. I thought about you while reading it (the indigo notes are mine of course):

Thanks, that's a good read. I agree that earthly and heavenly gravitational poles are one example of the polarities fueling the evolution of humanity. But notice that they both exist withing the framework of the dualistic state of consciousness.

THE INFLUENCES OF LUCIFER AND AHRIMAN
In Rudolf Steiner's sculpture, a strong figure stands with one clenched hand upraised to the beautiful Lucifer, the other hand stretched downward to the twisted and sclerotic Ahriman. The Representative of Humanity stands heroically, holding at bay and in balance the two opposing forces, centered within the “Third Force,” that force which we recognize in ourselves in the word ‘I’.

That's right. These polarities drive the evolution of souls while they exist in the dualistic state up to the point when they become ready and mature to transcend it and realize themselves as the Cosmic "I". And it is the "Third Force" that is actually curving the evolution towards such realization. The "I"-realization transcends the earth-heaven polarity and has no particular bias towards one or the other pole.

You are right that my interpretation of Lucifer and Ahriman is somewhat different. I agree that they represent a polarity, but IMO Ahriman and Lucifer are two "faces" or "personifications" of the same force-being, the force of duality (whatever we call him, the name does not matter, I call him "Demiurge"). Greeks intuitively knew that and depicted him as a "Two-faced Janus" deity who is a mythical metaphor of any polarity being two "faces" of the same essence. It is like the same electromagnetic force acting through two opposite positive and negative charges. Note that I'm not suggesting that the Demiurgic force is "evil", it represents an inevitable but temporary stage in the evolution of souls, it promotes evolution at certain developmental stages but becomes an impediment at further transitory stages until it becomes fully transcended at more mature stages.

*******

I agree that earthly and heavenly gravitational poles are one example of the polarities fueling the evolution of humanity. But notice that they both exist within the framework of the dualistic state of consciousness.

Well, no This is a way to pull yourself out of the polarities, at least to the extent that you are able to reach and maintain the "non-dual state". Whilst in reality, the true, fully integral non-dual state can only be reached by learning to progressively work through, and not aside of, the polarities. Our communion with Oneness is to be pursued within and not without the polarities.

Along this same line, I just thought of a really simple analogy to use here when putting together an office desk

When the screw gets tightened clockwise, the Ahrimanic over-materializing influence is at work. When the screw gets loosened counter-clockwise, the Luciferic spiritualizing influence is at work. The modern intellectual tendency, which lapses into one-sidedness (duality), is always tempted to focus only on the screw moving clockwise or counter-clockwise and lose sight of that 'Third Force', our first-person "I"-perspective which is wielding the screwdriver, applying torque on the polar influences to modulate them. If we overtighten the screw, then we splinter the wood. If we overloosen it, then we risk parts of the construction falling apart on us. Here the wood-construction is analogized to our Earthly body-soul organism. In either case, the integrity of the Earthly organism is threatened.

In order to modulate the torque properly to attain harmonious rhythms within our organism and the Earth organism (now we need to go beyond the analogy of spatial screws to the reality of our temporal WFT activity), we should become more conscious of the vertically nested "I"-forces which have always been flowing through us to make the Earth evolution possible. These are the progressive spiritual beings under the banner of the Christ-being, who guide the individual and collective destinies of the Earthly kingdoms and together, through their symphonic activity, unite them into a harmoniously functioning Whole. By working ourselves into greater consciousness of these higher impulses, we also take greater creative responsibility for their unfoldment, in our own souls and in the Earthly kingdoms, and thereby earn our spiritual freedom.

[Stranger]

Well, no This is a way to pull yourself out of the polarities, at least to the extent that you are able to reach and maintain the "non-dual state". Whilst in reality, the true, fully integral non-dual state can only be reached by learning to progressively work through, and not aside of, the polarities. Our communion with Oneness is to be pursued within and not without the polarities. Until the over-spiritualizing impulse is recognized and evolutionarily factored in (together with its opposite) there will remain that sense of incomplete understanding already referred to multiple times in the recent threads. Not that I have direct experience of this, of course. I am merely seeing from afar how it makes more and more sense with every further step. But yes, it's a progressive realization, it takes time and iterations, and we are all embarked on this journey!

That is what I said too, please read carefully:

These polarities drive the evolution of souls while they exist in the dualistic state up to the point when they become ready and mature to transcend it and realize themselves as the Cosmic "I".

In other words, until the gate of the realization of Oneness is passed, the polarities drive the "learning to progressively work through, and not aside of, the polarities". Once the realization happens, these polarities are no longer relevant, they are transcended. It means that these polarities are provisional and temporal and not absolute, they should noy be idolized, but it is still useful to study and know them to understand how they shape our evolutionary path.

By the way, you are operating a very arbitrary recruitment of Janus at the service of your opinion of choice here. As I noticed before on the forum, it is common that there is some level of confusion between ancient Greek and ancient Latin cultures, and I would like to seize the opportunity to say a word about that. Not that I am an expert, still it should be said that Janus is actually not a Greek deity, or god. It's interesting - Janus is practically the only Latin god that does not come from Greek cosmogony. He is inherently Latin/Roman. Janus is the god of the beginnings, the one who has always been there, from the origins of everything. The origin of his name is associated with the meanings of beginning, entrance, passage, and door. In English, the word January, and even the word janitor come from this same root. It means the god of the initial times/spaces, and the god of the passage, or entrance. In this way we can understand the sense of his two faces, that watch over both sides of the passage. So in this sense, yes, Janus is also the god of change and transmutation, but saying that the ancient Romans intuited the two-sided nature of evil and represented them through Janus, really is arbitrary.

Shure, I was just pointing to the archetype of a "two-faced god" that precipitated into the mythological figure of Janus.

[Federica]

I agree that earthly and heavenly gravitational poles are one example of the polarities fueling the evolution of humanity. But notice that they both exist within the framework of the dualistic state of consciousness.

Well, no This is a way to pull yourself out of the polarities, at least to the extent that you are able to reach and maintain the "non-dual state". Whilst in reality, the true, fully integral non-dual state can only be reached by learning to progressively work through, and not aside of, the polarities. Our communion with Oneness is to be pursued within and not without the polarities.

Along this same line, I just thought of a really simple analogy to use here when putting together an office desk

When the screw gets tightened clockwise, the Ahrimanic over-materializing influence is at work. When the screw gets loosened counter-clockwise, the Luciferic spiritualizing influence is at work. The modern intellectual tendency, which lapses into one-sidedness (duality), is always tempted to focus only on the screw moving clockwise or counter-clockwise and lose sight of that 'Third Force', our first-person "I"-perspective which is wielding the screwdriver, applying torque on the polar influences to modulate them. If we overtighten the screw, then we splinter the wood. If we overloosen it, then we risk parts of the construction falling apart on us. Here the wood-construction is analogized to our Earthly body-soul organism. In either case, the integrity of the Earthly organism is threatened.

In order to modulate the torque properly to attain harmonious rhythms within our organism and the Earth organism (now we need to go beyond the analogy of spatial screws to the reality of our temporal WFT activity), we should become more conscious of the vertically nested "I"-forces which have always been flowing through us to make the Earth evolution possible. These are the progressive spiritual beings under the banner of the Christ-being, who guide the individual and collective destinies of the Earthly kingdoms and together, through their symphonic activity, unite them into a harmoniously functioning Whole. By working ourselves into greater consciousness of these higher impulses, we also take greater creative responsibility for their unfoldment, in our own souls and in the Earthly kingdoms, and thereby earn our spiritual freedom.

Very nice analogy! Useful also because it's meaningful that splintering the wood is analogized to materialism and disengaging the screw from it counter-clockwise, to mysticism. Also, I had not connected the Christ-being to the ideal hierarchies before. I still don't really know how to imagine that, but thanks to your illustration I now have the question in sight. Finally, I like how you have worded the last reminder, that I much more prosaically have called knowing = being = doing

[Federica]

Federica, thanks for posting this Poplawski intro.

I view Lucifer as a highly evolved light-bearing being performing the dirty but necessary job of delivering the temptation, which carries the opportunity for transformation. Example: A person vows to break his smoking habit. Lucifer places a cigarette before her/him presenting the opportunity to form a new habit of not smoking. Choices bear fruits.

I'm glad to see you disregard the "drug comment" as there exist highly disciplined spiritual practices with entheogens.

The "veil of tears" stuff is surely complicated. I prefer the expression "valley of tears" simply pointing at the fact that there is no bodily birth without bodily death; that survival-based attachment is hard to let go and can call forth valid feelings of grief; and (with Goethe) that "death is Nature's ingenious device to guarantee more life."

Hey Lou,

Your view of Lucifer seems to match a traditional Catholic view, in which evil temptation is presented to us from outside, hoping to make us sin and become guilty of surrendering to earthly pleasures.

As for our existence on Earth being a "valley of tears", why maintain such a sad definition, if the underlying fact is the ever cycling polarity of existence revolving into itself through the threshold of life-death?

[Lou Gold]

Here's a rather prosaic image of getting through all-too-common polar comparisons of human/natural, spiritual/material, inner/outer, this/that...



The moon (Divine Feminine); the cross (Christ Consciousness); the entangled wires (QM and Shamanism - Mitakuye Oyasin) and all in the eye of the beholder represented via the dashboard of a camera.

WHAT FUN IT IS

[Federica]

Here's a rather prosaic image of getting through all-too-common polar comparisons of human/natural, spiritual/material, inner/outer, this/that...

The moon (Divine Feminine); the cross (Christ Consciousness); the entangled wires (QM and Shamanism - Mitakuye Oyasin) and all in the eye of the beholder represented via the dashboard of a camera.

WHAT FUN IT IS

Lou, for me this is not FUN, it's DECADENT. I'm not talking about the moon, not about the picture, but what you are doing with the picture is decadent.

Lucifer, however, represents a force that paradoxically can combine beauty and if you will, beauty gone too far, to the extreme of decadence, hence to evil.

[Lou Gold]

Federica, thanks for posting this Poplawski intro.

I view Lucifer as a highly evolved light-bearing being performing the dirty but necessary job of delivering the temptation, which carries the opportunity for transformation. Example: A person vows to break his smoking habit. Lucifer places a cigarette before her/him presenting the opportunity to form a new habit of not smoking. Choices bear fruits.

I'm glad to see you disregard the "drug comment" as there exist highly disciplined spiritual practices with entheogens.

The "veil of tears" stuff is surely complicated. I prefer the expression "valley of tears" simply pointing at the fact that there is no bodily birth without bodily death; that survival-based attachment is hard to let go and can call forth valid feelings of grief; and (with Goethe) that "death is Nature's ingenious device to guarantee more life."

Good questions, Federica,

"Your view of Lucifer seems to match a traditional Catholic view, in which evil temptation is presented to us from outside, hoping to make us sin and become guilty of surrendering to earthly pleasures."

It's not surrender to earthly pleasures but attachment to what is impermanent that causes pain.

It's a rather fundamental inner archetypal story. Jesus with Satan and Buddha with Mara. Sacrifice is surely a making sacred on lots of levels.

"As for our existence on Earth being a "valley of tears", why maintain such a sad definition, if the underlying fact is the ever cycling polarity of existence revolving into itself through the threshold of life-death?"

It's not a maintenance of the illusion but a compassionate recognition that duality carries both pleasure and pain appropriately processed through grieving. A processing is not a celebration or maintenance. It's the mechanism of getting through it.

[Lou Gold]

Here's a rather prosaic image of getting through all-too-common polar comparisons of human/natural, spiritual/material, inner/outer, this/that...

The moon (Divine Feminine); the cross (Christ Consciousness); the entangled wires (QM and Shamanism - Mitakuye Oyasin) and all in the eye of the beholder represented via the dashboard of a camera.

WHAT FUN IT IS

Lou, for me this is not FUN, it's DECADENT. I'm not talking about the moon, not about the picture, but what you are doing with the picture is decadent.

Lucifer, however, represents a force that paradoxically can combine beauty and if you will, beauty gone too far, to the extreme of decadence, hence to evil.

"Too far" means "too attached" -- commonly called "addiction" -- and it is surely NOT FUN.

Sorry that seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary seems decadent to you but I have no reason to argue against your view, for you.

Here's an interesting art piece -- Wangechi Mutu, “Yo Mama” (2003) -- about the recent valley of tears.

[AshvinP]

Well, no This is a way to pull yourself out of the polarities, at least to the extent that you are able to reach and maintain the "non-dual state". Whilst in reality, the true, fully integral non-dual state can only be reached by learning to progressively work through, and not aside of, the polarities. Our communion with Oneness is to be pursued within and not without the polarities.

Along this same line, I just thought of a really simple analogy to use here when putting together an office desk

When the screw gets tightened clockwise, the Ahrimanic over-materializing influence is at work. When the screw gets loosened counter-clockwise, the Luciferic spiritualizing influence is at work. The modern intellectual tendency, which lapses into one-sidedness (duality), is always tempted to focus only on the screw moving clockwise or counter-clockwise and lose sight of that 'Third Force', our first-person "I"-perspective which is wielding the screwdriver, applying torque on the polar influences to modulate them. If we overtighten the screw, then we splinter the wood. If we overloosen it, then we risk parts of the construction falling apart on us. Here the wood-construction is analogized to our Earthly body-soul organism. In either case, the integrity of the Earthly organism is threatened.

In order to modulate the torque properly to attain harmonious rhythms within our organism and the Earth organism (now we need to go beyond the analogy of spatial screws to the reality of our temporal WFT activity), we should become more conscious of the vertically nested "I"-forces which have always been flowing through us to make the Earth evolution possible. These are the progressive spiritual beings under the banner of the Christ-being, who guide the individual and collective destinies of the Earthly kingdoms and together, through their symphonic activity, unite them into a harmoniously functioning Whole. By working ourselves into greater consciousness of these higher impulses, we also take greater creative responsibility for their unfoldment, in our own souls and in the Earthly kingdoms, and thereby earn our spiritual freedom.

Very nice analogy! Useful also because it's meaningful that splintering the wood is analogized to materialism and disengaging the screw from it counter-clockwise, to mysticism. Also, I had not connected the Christ-being to the ideal hierarchies before. I still don't really know how to imagine that, but thanks to your illustration I now have the question in sight. Finally, I like how you have worded the last reminder, that I much more prosaically have called knowing = being = doing

Right, and it's a whole topic in itself to contemplate how our cultural institutions-forms were/have evolved to provide us metaphors which align so well with the supra-sensory realities we need to become conscious of to take hold of our further evolution. The 'technical' dynamics can be broadly understood through Cleric's metaphors about the layers of convolutions (or levels of indirection) through which holistic spiritual intents have condensed onto the physical-cultural plane. The normal perceptual-conceptual spectrum serves us up these 'hologaphic tokens', as it were.

It is actually the case that the Ahrimanic impulse works to 'screw in' our higher members tighter to the dense body, while the Lucifer influences loosens them from the dense body.

From our study of spiritual science we learn of the so-called “members” of man's constitution and we then speak of his physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego and so on. It may seem to many people that once they know of these members they have also, in some measure, understood man's real being; and indeed there are numbers who believe that they know the essentials if they are able to enumerate these different members of man's constitution, or even, possibly, to indicate what happens to one or another of them in the course of his incarnations. Although any study of man must necessarily begin with a knowledge of these members, we must be quite clear that this knowledge is very preliminary. For what is really important is not that the human being consists of these seven or nine members, but how they are related to one another, how each of them is connected with any one of the others. It must also be realised that the connections are by no means the same in all human beings, in every epoch. The connections and relationships change in the course of the ages of human evolution.
...
In order to grasp what this means we need only compare ancient times with our own epoch in one single respect. If we were to look back into the fourth or fifth millennium of ancient Egyptian civilisation and observe the men of that epoch, we should see that the interconnections between the physical body, etheric body and astral body were far looser than they are in men today. In those times the astral body and the etheric body were far less firmly linked with the physical body. The characteristic tendency of our present phase of evolution is precisely that the astral body and etheric body try to be connected more and more firmly with the physical body. This is very significant, for as evolution advances and the astral body and the etheric body of man tend to chain themselves more closely to the physical body, man is no longer able to influence his physical body from his soul to the extent that was possible in ancient times when the astral and etheric bodies were freer and the laws of the physical body did not, therefore, work into them as forcefully as they do today. When, in those times, a feeling arose in a man, or some idea came to him, the force of this feeling or idea spread quickly into the astral and etheric bodies, and from there — because the man had mastery over these members — he was able, from his soul, to be master of his physical body. This possibility of mastering the physical body from the soul is constantly becoming less, because the astral body and the etheric body are entrenching themselves more and more firmly in the physical body. But this has still another consequence, namely, that in the course of the ages, man's natural constitution makes him less and less accessible to those forces and powers which work down upon him from the spiritual world.

As mentioned before, though, there are rhtyhms within rhythms. The astral-ego loosens from the etheric-physical periodically and we know this as sleep, then it tightens back in and we know this as waking up. That leads us to experience our lives in the 'night-day' cycle (the higher-order rhythms which Steiner was discussing also modulate these cycles for collective experience). So, the more we discern these intimate rhythms, we can really start to feel how our entire known lives are woven out of this Ahrimanic-Lucifer polar tendency. As you say, there are no evil beings governing the 'dualistic realm' from afar, and we can't make the least bit of sense of our being-becoming, let alone attain Oneness, without a living knowledge of their influences in our lives. And that is also the Hope that we won't be endlessly tossed around on their waves of destiny, i.e. the Christ impulse through which our purified and loving "I"-force becomes more and more conscious of the polar rhythms on the astral, etheric, and physical planes, and thereby redeems them.

The mission of man consists precisely in this: through his own strength to be able to overcome a cosmic tendency... And so in the spiritual Movement appropriate for the present day, it is a matter of dealing with something that is a necessity for the future, a necessity that is part of the mission of man, something that is just as essential as any of the events that have overtaken the human race without co-operation on the part of men themselves. For a long, long time, no doubt, such truths will be vehemently opposed, but none of this opposition will ultimately avail. Men will become aware from the very form and direction taken by culture in the near future that this is how things are; the facts themselves will prove it.