AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Jan 28, 2024 2:22 am
I don't discuss much of these things "IRL", so hopefully Discord is not representative of how people engage in general. On the other hand, I am talking about the servers dedicated to idealism and even spiritual outlooks like Anthroposophy (or the highly intellectualized version of it). The only adjusting of views is jumping from one Maya to another, from materialism to mysticism, from idealism to panpsychism, or something similar. There is absolutely no willingness to experience the real-time activity of thinking, the imaginative soul-gestures that get encoded in streams of intellectual commentary about the 'secrets of existence'. The trend is more concerning than I even previously imagined.
Not that I get overly judgmental or pessimistic about it - I realize these inner configurations are modulated by 'powers and principalities' that are working through the sheer momentum of ingrained soul habits at this point. But as objective patterns that can be discerned from the large dataset accumulated from interacting with many of the same people over and over again, they are unmistakable. Most of the interest is in speculating about NDEs or glorifying psychedelics, asking questions about what might happen after death but [semi-consciously] never hoping to hear a viable answer. Here is an example of a comment I made recently in response to such a question:
It's interesting because I was just reading about how people in our time are becoming obsessed with the question of death, i.e. what happens when I die, where do I go, what do I get to experience, where I can travel, etc. In that sense, it reveals a certain egoistic tendency when we obsess over the question of death in that one-sided way. We are only interested in what spiritual reality can give to us after we leave the body.
What rarely gets attention is the other side of the spiritual coin - unbornness, i.e. the path of the individuality from the spiritual worlds onto Earth, the will to incarnate. Why do we rarely think through that stage of the journey? Perhaps because it would reveal what we came here to do on Earth - our concrete tasks, goals, and ideals that we should work toward fulfilling. It's not about what we can get from the spiritual worlds but what we can give back to them by inwardly perfecting ourselves.
If we were to focus on that stage of the journey more, then perhaps our after-death experience wouldn't be so hellish either. Because it is precisely our own inner life, our own soul space, that we first awaken into after death. It is like a Cosmic mirror is erected in front of our inner life so we perceive objectively all that we did or failed to do with our opportunities during life. This is only 'scary' when understood from within the body - when we actually experience it apart from bodily cognition, we know it is the greatest gift because it gives us a chance to compensate for all the disharmony we wove into the World.
Met with deafening silence, except for - "
Where are you getting all this from this seems like new age mumbo jumbo after you dead it's to late", from the guy who asked about why many NDE experiences were so "hellish". I don't see how anyone can reach the more demanding part of the task - calibrating our activity to be guided by the Good, which I agree will be of critical importance - before it is even suspected that there is a soul space of imaginative gestures to be guided. It seems to me the easy half is not so easy. Of course, that is not because of any externalized reasons like "it is too difficult to understand the esoteric terms or following the arguments" or anything like that, only because many people have lost sight of real-time thinking altogether and have used the commentary to convince themselves there is nothing to look for except reflected preferences and personal entertainment.
I was actually referring, on the one end, to discussions and debates in entirely general terms, beyond philosophical forums, and on the other end, to the steps toward selfless action that are to be taken by someone for example like me, who’s had the chance to come to know great examples, and is therefore called to move forward in that work "against nature”.
The Discord analytic idealism forum members you dialogue with may have a tougher time identifying alert signs on 'the problem with thinking' typical of our times. Chances are they are caught in the self-fulfilling personal prophecy of the dissociative bubble, coated with curved mirrors on the inside, and cargo aircraft walls on the outside. From that stance, anyone waiving big alert signs in their vicinity will be perceived as a wiggling dot on their radar and will be sent alarmed identification requests.“
Where are you getting all this from” = “you, unidentified bubble, kindly provide bubble label and bubble coordinates for due categorizing"
But in a sense I think it’s difficult to blame them for not getting the meaning encoded in your reply. We are entering exactly those times, slightly after the year 2000, when - as Steiner said - there will be in the West a situation comparable to a:
Steiner wrote:...ban on all thinking, not a direct one, but a kind of ban on all thinking, a law that will have the purpose of suppressing all individual thinking. On the one hand, there is a beginning of that in what purely materialistic medicine is doing today, where the soul is no longer allowed to work, where people are treated like a machine only on the basis of external experiments.
(…)
For example we have machines today which add and subtract: everything is convenient, we don't need to do any calculations anymore. And that's how you'll do with everything. That won't take long, a few centuries - then everything will be finished. Then you will no longer need to think, no longer need to consider, you just push. For example: “330 bales of Liverpool cotton”. That’s something to think about today, isn’t it? But then you will just push and the matter will be settled. And so that the solid structure of the social context of the future is not disturbed, laws will be passed which will not directly say “thinking is forbidden” but which will have the effect of eliminating all individual thinking.
(Lecture available
here or
here)
So you’re right. The easy half is definitely not so easy, when the needed understanding is not a thematic one, but an all-encompassing one, hence one that calls out the stance of the inquirer himself. That the first necessity is to set straight the understanding of the understanding of the inquirer himself - before he starts playing with a topic of inquiry at the philosophical speculation game table - is so unsuspected, as you say. I guess one of the roles of the Anthroposophical counter measure to this trend is to never cease to figure out ways to convey what has to click in the inquirer, and keep fighting the ban on all thinking, employing as much of “both halves” as one can.