Re: Meditation
Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2024 8:27 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 21, 2024 4:50 pm Ashvin,
Please consider, there's no projection and there's no victim here. When you say that I base my understanding on passages snipped out from lectures, you're pushing and pulling the truth (I know how I do it, and I refer to inner approach) and when you say that I was worried about how the consecration example might react with someone who decides to proceed on blind faith, you might not agree, but from my perspective you are distorting again, based on your judgments on how I operate, and judgments on how perfect Cleric's consacration suggestion was (and just this once, I don't think it was). Anyway, if you agree, I would now prefer to focus on your last post, quoted in this one.
I read these Meditation and Concentration lectures too. As said, when I read a lecture, I put effort in changing my attitude into ‘listening to the lecture’ in the time and context in which it was given, rather than simply reading it as a transcript. I think it's clear, this is already a kind of attuning rotation, as it were. Also, believe it or not, my argument that Steiner was speaking somewhat favorably about an intellectual understanding of spiritual science (as I tried to render in my post just above) does not mean at all that my “personal belief and preference” goes to an abstract and intellectual reading of the concepts of spiritual science. Therefore, I am telling you, this is not a personal preference I am projecting into the lecture. It’s only just not my preference, as it turns out. Therefore - even in we say that I blindly project my preferences in what I read - that particular preference could not be projected, since it’s not mine.
Federica,
Thanks for these additional considerations. The only thing I meant by 'basing understanding on snippets' is that we can become quite selective in what we focus on without realizing it. Steiner's archive presents endless angles of approach on the same essential topics and sometimes they can seem in direct conflict, as we saw with those quotes from the same lecture cycle. Are we fully conscious of why we are drawn to certain formalizations and not others?
Personally, I don't think trying to transport into the 'time and context' of the lecture is going to help alleviate the issue too much. The context of early 19th century Germany is still going to be quite a black box into which we project our personalized shades of meaning. The only safe way I see is to resist forming any firm conclusions about what is meant until we build a holistic intuition for how our spiritual activity meets resistance in various domains of experience - sensory, soul, and spiritual worlds.
In the context of this question of 'intellectual understanding', 'reasoned thinking', and so forth, we should be able to know from within exactly what sort of spiritual activity is necessary to move from one domain to another. Since Steiner is fundamentally speaking of these universal aspects of spiritual activity, we will resonate with the concepts he is employing once we develop our intuition for how our inner activity moves in relation to the sensory, psychic, and ideal stream of experience. Then we no longer need to add any personalized shades of meaning to reach firm conclusions about the spirit of what is meant. We know that Steiner could only be speaking of 'reasoned thinking' in certain ways because that's the only thing that makes sense for approaching the soul-spiritual domains of experience in a fruitful way.
Federica wrote:Anyhow, I am familiar with the passage you quote, and I have been reflecting on it, in connection with the posts of page 19-20 of this thread. I have a question. As I understand it, the ultimate meaning of perception, in the widest sense possible - be it in the physical, in the etheric, or in the soul-spiritual - is the experience of finding the ever-emerging, contourless shape of our own individual activity as beings, no matter if alive or dead. This involves realizing the working of some kind of feedback to our activity. When awake in the etheric, the feedback to our thinking activity is provided by the ‘narrowing down of possibilities’ jointly brought about by the ideal constraints, or rotations of the Ls, and our brain, that filters, photographs and reflects back the end-results. We adjust to them, and as a consequence, we get confirmation of the nature and form of our activity, of our self.
Now, Steiner says that when we lose the ether body, past the gate of death, our organs of perception become the thoughts and actions that we impressed during our life on Earth. These become our eyes and ears. I get that there is no more visual/spatial dimension, and perception becomes a solely temporal, musical experience. And our life on Earth is a temporal expression of our being that we have with us. But I would have expected that, after death, feedback and sense of the shape of our individuality (perception) would be provided directly, continuously and solely by an endless flow of harmonization of our activity with the evolving flow of ideal constraints expressed by the other beings. And I would have expected that our past thoughts and actions would have worked as karmic constraints, sort of fixed constraints to the quality of spiritual activity one is able to become.
I thought that (once dead, without the detour of brain reflection) feedback would be perceived directly in the soul, as spiritual activity that is not expression of our will, but comes to meet ours from 'outside'. So I am struggling to grasp how the activity of other beings and our life record may integrate then (if they do) so as to give us overall perception of how we become in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. Is there anything that can be added to clarify this?
Yes. the first paragraph seems mostly on point to me. When awake in the etheric, it's no longer the physical brain (sensory system) reflecting our activity, but the 'etheric brain' that can reflect holistic curvatures of life experience through images, independent of the physical senses.
Here's one angle of approach on your question - imagine that you went through life with perfect attention to all your experiences. You were always centered in the first-person flow of activity and could therefore understand the opportunities for inner perfection that arose from every experience. You reacted in the most Good, Beautiful, and True way to every interaction and relationship with other people that destiny brought your way. In these completely idealistic circumstances, you could immortalize your sheaths in a single incarnation and attain complete continuity of consciousness, i.e. transcend the cycle of reincarnation. In that sense, each life between birth and death presents us with such an idealized opportunity but, of course, the reality is that much of it is wasted and remains as untapped potential for future incarnations.
So, after death, this 'differential' between the idealized scenario and what was actually realized becomes the organ of perception that reflects Cosmic spiritual activity. Just as we use eyes, ears, etc. to reflect on the sensory spectrum and triangulate the meaning that will help us move toward various Earthly goals, the Cosmic hierarchies with which our individuality is interwoven after death reflect on this differential to triangulate the inner configurations necessary to move toward the Cosmic goals. We are always bouncing between 'past' (karmic constraints) and 'future' (potential development) in that sense, both during life and after death. Only, after death, the aperture of past and future we are bouncing between becomes much more expansive, Cosmic-scale (in the temporal sense).
I would remind here of a simple example I gave to Lorenzo and Guney before.
For ex. imagine you are stopped at a stop sign and need to turn left. For that, you need to cross two lanes of traffic going from your left to right and merge into another lane of traffic going from right to left. What do you do? First, you visually sense the oncoming cars in either direction, looking left and right. These visual sensations stimulate your thinking to expand into a broader intuitive context of principles that help you anticipate the future. In this case, you expand into the intuition of how distance and speed relate to the time it takes for moving objects to reach certain locations, both the other vehicles and your own. The whole time you are also rhythmically moving back to the sensations and allowing those to feed back into your expansive intuitive context that anctipates the future. All of this rhythmic activity takes place very quickly and smoothly without you needing to explore it in clear-cut concepts. Even without such concepts, we can know it is actually happening and we can later use our concepts to make this experience clearer to ourselves like we are doing now.
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On a larger scale, our entire incarnation in the sensory world is like the visual sensations of cars above. We are 'looking back' to what our intuitive activity previously imploded into manifest structures - the elements, the natural kingdoms, cultural institutions - so as to stimulate our current activity and triangulate the most optimal course forward to fulfill Divine intents. The sensory spectrum experienced through the physical body kindles new intuitions that help us anticipate the remaining intuitive potential that has yet to be incarnated. We try our best to incarnate that intuitive potential and then continue our work within the higher modes of consciousness after death (the Cosmic spheres we expand into), where the experiences during incarnation can be worked on much more directly, from a higher vantage point, in concert with communities of living souls and the higher hierarchies. With this work, however, we cannot make perfect sense of the holistic Cosmic evolution - there are still capacities and qualities missing to fulfill the holistic intent - so we contract back into the sensory world to develop the missing elements. By cycling through the modes of consciousness, we are viewing the same spiritual relations from different temporal angles, bouncing between what we experience as 'past' and 'future', to triangulate the perfect Cosmic intent where all beings know themselves as One.
This is the essential rhythm that we know from PoF, between Intuition (future potential), Thinking (mediating link), and Perception (karmic constraints). It should be noted, in that sense, the sensory-brain reflection is only a 'detour' to the extent we fail to use it for its higher intended purposes, i.e. to work for inner perfection and thereby spiral together the Earthly and Cosmic goals. As long as our rhythm consists of tasks related to navigating stop signs and so forth (or even speculating on spiritual questions via abstract philosophies), and nothing more, we are stuck in an infernal loop, repetitively taking the same detour over and over again without extracting the deeper lessons for our inner perfection. But as soon as we become self-aware of the rhythms involved in navigating stop signs (and everything else), we are in a position to leverage the sensory 'detour' into the fulfillment of more expansive Cosmic tasks that we normally work on only after death.