LukeJTM wrote: ↑Tue Mar 14, 2023 1:34 pm
I think another question we can ask to penetrate a bit deeper into the cause is, why is it so difficult for people to notice (and remember) the role of their own first-person conceptual activity when observing the world? After all, Steiner is simply bringing our attention to something very intimate and verifiable to our experience. Perhaps your experience of reading PoF was similar to mine - I wondered, 'how did I miss this reality for so long?' So there is clearly something within our soul-life which actively works towards keeping us in the dark about this integral spiritual activity which should otherwise be obvious to anyone paying close attention to how they make sense of the world.
Thanks for moving my post into a better room.
Yes, I must admit that reading PoF was a bit confusing at first because I didn't realize, initially, that a lot of what Steiner wrote in the book was based on his first person observations of his inner life, even though it literally hints that in the book's subtitle! I think it is just the mode of thinking I came to expect from philosophy and science that caused my confusion. I do like the approach he took, which is certainly a refreshing change from the orthodox ways.
I definitely think one factor keeping us in the dark about the depths of inner life is the way Western tends to function now. There is a lot of sources of entertainment and things causing sensory overload, such as screens, video games, or nonsense like celebrity gossip, invasive advertisements, etc. Of course there is nothing wrong with simply watching a film, or playing a computer game, my point is that it is often too easy to spend too much time on these activities, leaving no time spent on inner life. Workaholic lifestyles is another factor I think, because people can be so focused on surviving that there isn't always the right space for focusing on their inner life and some kind of spiritual practice that works for them.
But you seem to be saying that there are even deeper forces underneath all those complicated factors, I think you are trying to say that there are spirits that influence human evolution on a bigger scale. But I don't have much more to comment on that because I am not too knowledgeable on it.
It seems to be the case that the abstract mode of thinking/seeking knowledge is simply laying a groundwork for the next stage of human evolution. What do you think of that?
Luke,
Indeed there are spirits tied to everything. We could say every morsel of food we eat is connected with the activity of spiritual beings. Some of these are referred to as 'spirits of darkness', to the extent they distract us from high Cosmic ideals and entrench us further in
personalized Earthly interests. It's interesting that alcohol is commonly referred to as 'spirits', which is a remant of more ancient knowledge which was well aware of the spiritual forces in nature. Obviously alcohol weakens our will and ego-consciousness, driving us into a more animalistic state. So we can point to many interwoven developments of body-soul-spirit over the last 2,500 years or so which has brought us to the point of extreme separation from consciousness of the spritual worlds and activity which live in our inner life of thinking, feeling, and will. Hence we saw the rise of nominalism, rationalism/dualism, Kantian idealism, materialism, modern mysticism. These all come from the underlying spiritual root, in which we blot out consciousnses of our ongoing
activity of perception-cognition by focusing only on the finished content of that activity.
But as you point out, all these developments serve critical purposes in the spiritual evolution of humanity. Generally that relates to developing our inner thinking freedom so we can voluntarily reattune ourselves as individuals and collectives with the progressive Cosmic rhythms. As Steiner puts it in PoF, the World Content can freely become our Thought-Content and we can thereby develop moral imagination. So that is another reason to be wary of mystical reductionism, which generally loses sight of this overarching evolutionary process and thereby reduces the Earthly/physical plane and our intellectual capacity to mere illusion and something to be shunned or compartmentalized into an orthogonal domain of life which has little to do with spiritual enlightenment. That is not the case at all on the path of modern initiation. Instead, we seek to work
through the ego-conscious intellect and the Earthly plane to earn our spiritual degrees of freedom and bring back the fruits to others (in which the intellect clearly plays a critical bridging role), thereby spiritualizing the World in progressive stages.
I think it's clear that this propsect is subconsciously pushed away by the reductionists, material and mystical, because, after all, who really wants to also become responsible for the World along with their spiritual enlightenment? It's very interesting how people generally jump from one reductionism to another to another, at various stages of life. Usually, if we are interested in thinking about these things at all, it starts with the default material-perceptual reductionism. But then we jump into a mystical, religious, or philosophically idealistic reductionism, depending on our circumstances. All the while, we point out how the camp we just jumped from is silly, stupid, deluded, etc. The places we haven't yet jumped to are superstitious or unknowable or something similar. We want Reality to reduce to our
current perceptions and thoughts, whatever those happen to be at any given stage of our development, because that means we are exactly where we need to be for a comprehensive understanding and little further effort is required.
It's interesting because, as you are aware, and referred to in your comment to Cleric, there are subtle bodies which weave us more into the Cosmic life of ideational activity than the dense atomized body we normally perceive, which appears to connect us only to a limited aperture of Earthly happenings. Through esoteric science, we know there is only One being in the entire Cosmos who possesses
all the vehicles which connect the dense body right through to the 'right hand' of the Father (Absolute Spirit), thereby building the true gradient between Earth and Cosmos (Heaven). That is the Christ being after his incarnation. So, if we really let such things sink into our minds and hearts, we begin to discern that the path forward for human evolution becomes
imitatio Christi - we can participate in the concrete realization of this Earthly to Cosmic gradient which has been established through his sacrifice. That discernment is really what the next step of our spiritual evolution entails.