Spiritual science of Martinus

[ScottRoberts]

Well, in your formulation "oneness is no other than manyness, manyness is no other than oneness" it literally states that one is no other than the other, so that's why I re-phrased them as "ontologically equal". So, if you claim that they are not ontologically equal, but are a polarity on the same existential level, then your formula "oneness is no other than manyness, manyness is no other than oneness" is not longer relevant.

"oneness is no other than manyness, manyness is no other than oneness", by itself, is just a logical contradiction -- nonsense. Yet it was said as revelation. Aristotelian logic must simply reject it. So, in the spirit of Lessing's quote, "Revelation is not rational when revealed, but is revealed so that it may become rational" I have borrowed Coleridge's polarity, framed it in terms of the tetralemma, to make sense of it. To do so, one needs to extend the meaning of 'rational', which is done by adding polar logic. With polar logic, one can then say "oneness is, yet is not, manyness." So when I say they are not the same, I am emphasizing the "is not" of that phrase, which is what makes my ontology not pantheism, which latter is staying within the confines of Aristotelian logic.

Another point is the principle of ontological monism to which your scheme does not fit. The intuition in monism is that there is one ontological "substance" ("substratum", "media", or "essence") which is the same everywhere in the world and of which all things in the world are made. Most philosophical schemes - materialism, idealism, neutral monism and others, follow this principle (except for Descartes kind of mind-matter dualism). If you postulate two "poles" that interact with each other, then there must be some common "media" of which they are both "made of" and through which they interact. Two "poles" with different ontological nature/substance could not interact with each other. And that brings us back to monism - even if you have two poles, there must be some common "substance" or "media" of which these two poles are "composed" so to speak. In dual-aspect monism they follow the same logic - postulate a common ontological "neutral" substrate from which two aspects (matter and consciousness) emerge. So, in your scheme, if you want to keep it monistic, you would also arrive to some common substratum, but if you don't want to assume the common substratum, then how would you account for the existence of two "poles" that interact with each other?

All this is simply trying to stay within the limits of Aristotelian logic. Instead, I say that the polarity (also called ideational activity) is the substance, where the two poles are, yet are not, one.

[AshvinP]

Yes, I agree with the above quote. To put it crudely:

Thinking activity lays down layers upon layers of Thought-form through involution, which in esotericism we know as the various planes, ethers, elements, sheaths, and physical perceptions, which includes durations of Time-experience (ages, epochs, etc.). Here our entire temporally extended personality can be understood as a Thought-form. At a certain point, Thinking activity itself dies fully into its creation, into its Thought (MoG). It thereby imbues its created mirror images with new life. Thought awakens from its enchantment in abstract space and begins to move again, to become temporally active, fluid, and mobile, and it spirals back into unity with Thinking activity. Which is to also say, it progressively re-awakens to its unity with Thinking activity. These are how the poles eternally work into one another through the sacrificial Love of the 'I'.

Although you know this already, I feel like it should always be added, the real work is to realize this dynamic more and more concretely within ourselves, so that we are actually participating in this resurrection of Thought in attunement with the most proximate intents to fulfill.

Ashvin,

Not sure how crudely put that was. Probably what follows will be infinitely more crude, because in fact, I still don't get it Why is "Thought", with capital T, that which awakens from its enchantment, and not the activity of Thinking that metamorphoses? Thought is the incessantly created, manifested, impermanent, and thought - as long as, and to the extent that, it will exist as such - will still be the mirror of that which we are not spiritually seeing, correct? It cannot be enlivened as such, but only transformed, redeemed, progressively transcended, through living thinking. The more thinking (not thought) will become "temporally active, fluid and mobile", the less thought and physicality will be around, I would imagine?
In this connection I was conceiving the poles of a polarity as competing attractors along the path of becoming, that at the same time repel each other, and that we need to balance and integrate by realizing their synthesis, or spiraling. Like for instance the poles of mystic and materialistic tendencies. But now, if we see Thought as the polar opposite of Thinking, that would be a concept of polarity exactly orthogonal to the previous. Now we have to transform one pole into the other, rather than keeping them both alive and in balance. In other words, I thought of polarity as a West-East thing while we are moving North. But you're saying that South-North itself - as we are heading North - also is a polarity?

I would say Thinking without Thought is loveless. But the absolute Divine is Love. It bears the eternal tendency of sacrificing itself into negative images, i.e. thoughts-perceptions. Thereby new evolving relationships are created. And when Thought becomes so isolated that it loses sight of Thinking, i.e. the thread which weave all be-ings into unity, then it freely develops the capacity to Love anew from within itself. Thought gives birth to loving Thinking. It might help to consider it at higher scale-relative domains, instead of what we are mostly familiar with (spatiotemporal concepts and perceptions). In esotericism, there is the concept of the 'upper gods' and the 'lower gods'. We can even say the upper gods are the thoughts of the lower gods.

Thus we see the most important event for the Earth was prepared in the old Sun, we see humanity prepared for the Christ through the ancient Hebrew civilisation. We see the Being who once separated Himself from the Earth and went to the Sun return to the Earth again; but we see too that He first revealed Himself to man in a mirrored image, so to say in a representation. Jahve or Jehovah is related to the real Christ just as the upper gods are related to the lower ones, he is the representation of the real Christ, and to those who see through things, resembles Him completely. Hence in a certain way we can speak of Jehovah-Christ, and in doing so light upon the true sense of the Gospels, which relate that the Christ Himself said: ‘If you would come to know Me, then you must know how Moses and the Prophets have spoken of Me.’ Christ knew well that when, of old, people spoke of Jehovah or Jahve, they were speaking of Him, and that all that was said of Jahve applied to Himself, as the mirror-image is related to its archetype.

That takes us into deep esoteric territory, but the point being that this polar relation persists even in the upper echelons of Cosmic life. Every aspect of reality is a polarity. One could overarch them all with Formlessness-Form (understanding these as forces), as Scott does. Ideation-Perception, Thinking-Thought, Spirit-Matter, Hot-Cold, Fire-Air, Water-Earth, North-South, East-West, etc. They all basically refer us back to same essential relation from different angles of experience or conceptualization. There can't be anything in our experience which is 'left over', i.e. which is unessential. The 'I' is that red thread running throughout which maintains the harmony-balance between the poles at all scales, in all domains of experience. If we polarize too much to Thinking, we are in reductive mysticism (even if the mystic calls the pole something other than 'thinking'), and if we polarize too much to Thought, we are in reductive materialism. So we do need to maintain the balance between them as we spiral towards the Good, the perfect archetype of Thinking-I-Thought.

[AshvinP]

A note on the concept of polarity - it's interesting to observe how it acts as a prompting. We should feel that it is straining the intellect to think through. It basically says to us, 'what you're dealing with here is nothing like you have ever come across in standard thought of philosophy, science, theology, etc. - now that you have unwound the classical categorizations or 'camps' in your thought by way of this concept, it is time to seek out the inner experience of polarity in your own willed thinking'. At that point, if we still feel it is adequate to use the traditional labels to categorize, then we have not understood or heeded the prompting of the polarity concept.

Right. The normal intellect cannot understand tetralemmic polarity. But one can, so to speak, "get used to it", as a famous physicist said of quantum physics "nobody understands it, you just get used to it". And, for ontology that is all one needs, bearing in mind that ontology is only an intellectual exercise. It serves to clear out a lot of undergrowth.

Indeed. I think Barfield refers to it as a 'sustained acceptance' of polar thinking in StA. That is what I like to refer as 'living thinking', which is in my mind sort of halfway between normal intellect and imaginative cognition. Energetic philosophy which doesn't succumb to indolence can certainly exercise our thinking muscle and purify our personalized soul-life to make its paths straight for the Spirit.

[AshvinP]

Yes, I agree with the above quote. To put it crudely:

Thinking activity lays down layers upon layers of Thought-form through involution, which in esotericism we know as the various planes, ethers, elements, sheaths, and physical perceptions, which includes durations of Time-experience (ages, epochs, etc.). Here our entire temporally extended personality can be understood as a Thought-form. At a certain point, Thinking activity itself dies fully into its creation, into its Thought (MoG). It thereby imbues its created mirror images with new life. Thought awakens from its enchantment in abstract space and begins to move again, to become temporally active, fluid, and mobile, and it spirals back into unity with Thinking activity. Which is to also say, it progressively re-awakens to its unity with Thinking activity. These are how the poles eternally work into one another through the sacrificial Love of the 'I'.

Although you know this already, I feel like it should always be added, the real work is to realize this dynamic more and more concretely within ourselves, so that we are actually participating in this resurrection of Thought in attunement with the most proximate intents to fulfill.

Ashvin,

Not sure how crudely put that was. Probably what follows will be infinitely more crude, because in fact, I still don't get it Why is "Thought", with capital T, that which awakens from its enchantment, and not the activity of Thinking that metamorphoses? Thought is the incessantly created, manifested, impermanent, and thought - as long as, and to the extent that, it will exist as such - will still be the mirror of that which we are not spiritually seeing, correct? It cannot be enlivened as such, but only transformed, redeemed, progressively transcended, through living thinking. The more thinking (not thought) will become "temporally active, fluid and mobile", the less thought and physicality will be around, I would imagine?
In this connection I was conceiving the poles of a polarity as competing attractors along the path of becoming, that at the same time repel each other, and that we need to balance and integrate by realizing their synthesis, or spiraling. Like for instance the poles of mystic and materialistic tendencies. But now, if we see Thought as the polar opposite of Thinking, that would be a concept of polarity exactly orthogonal to the previous. Now we have to transform one pole into the other, rather than keeping them both alive and in balance. In other words, I thought of polarity as a West-East thing while we are moving North. But you're saying that South-North itself - as we are heading North - also is a polarity?

I would say Thinking without Thought is loveless. But the absolute Divine is Love. It bears the eternal tendency of sacrificing itself into negative images, i.e. thoughts-perceptions. Thereby new evolving relationships are created. And when Thought becomes so isolated that it loses sight of Thinking, i.e. the thread which weave all be-ings into unity, then it freely develops the capacity to Love anew from within itself. Thought gives birth to loving Thinking. It might help to consider it at higher scale-relative domains, instead of what we are mostly familiar with (spatiotemporal concepts and perceptions). In esotericism, there is the concept of the 'upper gods' and the 'lower gods'. We can even say the upper gods are the thoughts of the lower gods.

Thus we see the most important event for the Earth was prepared in the old Sun, we see humanity prepared for the Christ through the ancient Hebrew civilisation. We see the Being who once separated Himself from the Earth and went to the Sun return to the Earth again; but we see too that He first revealed Himself to man in a mirrored image, so to say in a representation. Jahve or Jehovah is related to the real Christ just as the upper gods are related to the lower ones, he is the representation of the real Christ, and to those who see through things, resembles Him completely. Hence in a certain way we can speak of Jehovah-Christ, and in doing so light upon the true sense of the Gospels, which relate that the Christ Himself said: ‘If you would come to know Me, then you must know how Moses and the Prophets have spoken of Me.’ Christ knew well that when, of old, people spoke of Jehovah or Jahve, they were speaking of Him, and that all that was said of Jahve applied to Himself, as the mirror-image is related to its archetype.

That takes us into deep esoteric territory, but the point being that this polar relation persists even in the upper echelons of Cosmic life. Every aspect of reality is a polarity. One could overarch them all with Formlessness-Form (understanding these as forces), as Scott does. Ideation-Perception, Thinking-Thought, Spirit-Matter, Hot-Cold, Fire-Air, Water-Earth, North-South, East-West, etc. They all basically refer us back to same essential relation from different angles of experience or conceptualization. There can't be anything in our experience which is 'left over', i.e. which is unessential. The 'I' is that red thread running throughout which maintains the harmony-balance between the poles at all scales, in all domains of experience. If we polarize too much to Thinking, we are in reductive mysticism (even if the mystic calls the pole something other than 'thinking'), and if we polarize too much to Thought, we are in reductive materialism. So we do need to maintain the balance between them as we spiral towards the Good, the perfect archetype of Thinking-I-Thought.

Also, I just noticed this post from Cleric which highlights how we can actually experience thought coming to life in imaginative meditation (or, conversely, ourselves awakening to the normally obscured life of thought) - viewtopic.php?p=21227#p21227

The living thought-image is certainly feeding back into our thinking, which is also coming to life, but we can also clearly distinguish between the two in the relation of formless activity to perceived result of activity.

When we cultivate the proper feelings and ideas (which act as a fertile soil), we can meditate on a single thought-image while leaving in the periphery everything else. With practice, we’re able to support this single flash for prolonged periods of time and if we succeed to relax the geometry of our ego (which otherwise tries to feel as a container of the flash) then the nature of the flash begins to fill our whole consciousness. Our whole inner world becomes of the nature of a thought-image, yet this thought-image has life of its own that feeds back on our activity. Normally we don’t notice this life of a thought.

[Stranger]

All this is simply trying to stay within the limits of Aristotelian logic. Instead, I say that the polarity (also called ideational activity) is the substance, where the two poles are, yet are not, one.

OK, from "supra-logical" perspective that's a possibility, I get it. However, if we look at our direct experience, we see that thinking creates/causes thoughts into existence, but not the other way around: thoughts do not cause thinking into existence. Thinking is always there available, lucidity of experiencing never changes, but thoughts are impermanent and always come and go, and in lucid deep sleep or deep meditation we can experience an absence of thoughts (at least locally in our individual conscious stream stream) while thinking and experiencing are still present. So, this polarity is not equal, it is significantly "skewed" towards thinking: thinking, as it is experienced, is causally and temporally more "fundamental" with respect to thoughts. And I would think this is what Steiner meant in this phrase "Thinking must precede ideas" - he just reflected upon a simple phenomenologically experiential observation without making any ontological statements. This experiential observation is the basis for the panentheistic paradigms where the "source" (Thinking) is prioritized with respect to the forms/ideas (Thought).

In the Christian theology the Trinity is an inseparable unity, however the poles are not equal: both the Son and the Holy Spirit are "sourced" from the Father (the Son is "begotten" from the Father and the Holy spirit "proceeds" from the Father), and in Catholic Church they even consider the Holy Spirit proceeding for the Son as well (which is the main split between the Orthodox and Catholic church). So, the Christian theology is clearly panentheistic, and that view is rooted in Gospels:

"When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, [that is] the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me" (John 15:26)

But anyway, even if we accept Ashvin's scheme of the Trinity of Thinking-I-Though where all these aspects are existentially equal, there is still oneness of the "I" in this Trinity (because there is only one I in the whole reality) , and it is inseparable and unavoidable pole/aspect of reality. So, either way, we arrive at oneness which is inseparable from the manyness and not prioritized over it.

[AshvinP]

And I would think this is what Steiner meant in this phrase "Thinking must precede ideas" - he just reflected upon a simple phenomenologically experiential observation without making any ontological statements. This experiential observation is the basis for the panentheistic paradigms where the "source" (Thinking) is prioritized with respect to the forms/ideas (Thought).

In the Christian theology the Trinity is an inseparable unity, however the poles are not equal: both the Son and the Holy Spirit are "sourced" from the Father (the Son is "begotten" from the Father and the Holy spirit "proceeds" from the Father), and in Catholic Church they even consider the Holy Spirit proceeding for the Son as well (which is the main split between the Orthodox and Catholic church). So, the Christian theology is clearly panentheistic, and that view is rooted in Gospels:

"When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, [that is] the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me" (John 15:26)

But anyway, even if we accept Ashvin's scheme of the Trinity of Thinking-I-Though where all these aspects are existentially equal, there is still oneness of the "I" in this Trinity (because there is only one I in the whole reality) , and it is inseparable and unavoidable pole/aspect of reality. So, either way, we arrive at oneness which is inseparable from the manyness and not prioritized over it.

The purpose of a phenomenology, such as Steiner's, is to establish facts of experience and use these as portals to continue our investigation, not to make them into foundations for a formal metaphysical system. We can't only look at our experience or only use our reason when investigating these questions, but instead continually use both together in harmony. If we experience 'thinking precedes ideas' and then stop there and declare, 'there we have it, thinking is prior to and more essential than thought', we have stopped reasoning. It is a fact that thinking must precede thought, but it is also a fact that there is never thinking in the absence of thought-perception. One must positively obscure the latter from view to reach such a conclusion. It is like a person shooting an arrow and then immediately turning around and walking away, refusing to look at the result of where it lands. Phenomenology is overall something to be experienced and lived, not to be contemplated as a self-enclosed system.

The process looks different when we examine knowledge, or rather the relation of man to the world which arises within knowledge. In the preceding chapters the attempt has been made to show that an unprejudiced observation of this relationship is able to throw light on its nature. A proper understanding of this observation leads to the insight that thinking can be directly discerned as a self-contained entity. Those who find it necessary for the explanation of thinking as such to invoke something else, such as physical brain processes or unconscious spiritual processes lying behind the conscious thinking which they observe, fail to recognize what an unprejudiced observation of thinking yields. When we observe our thinking, we live during this observation directly within a self-supporting, spiritual web of being. Indeed, we can even say that if we would grasp the essential nature of spirit in the form in which it presents itself most immediately to man, we need only look at the self-sustaining activity of thinking.

When we are contemplating thinking itself, two things coincide which otherwise must always appear apart, namely, concept and percept. If we fail to see this, we shall be unable to regard the concepts which we have elaborated with respect to percepts as anything but shadowy copies of these percepts, and we shall take the percepts as presenting to us the true reality. We shall, further, build up for ourselves a metaphysical world after the pattern of the perceived world; we shall call this a world of atoms, a world of will, a world of unconscious spirit, or whatever, each according to his own kind of mental imagery. And we shall fail to notice that all the time we have been doing nothing but building up a metaphysical world hypothetically, after the pattern of our own world of percepts.

This is generally why the polar relation is sundered - so we have a reason to avoid looking at how our thinking continually incarnates and impresses its activity into the World-state, which, when made conscious, we become concretely responsible for compensating. That is why it becomes such a problem to remain at this abstract resolution - the overall living experience, as individuals and collectives, is quickly lost sight of. If we get in the habit of treating these ontological discussions as simply exercises for refining our thinking and accustoming it to new habits, then we won't seek to wrap up the mysteries of Cosmic evolution in a neat little bow in the course of a few comments. We won't convince ourselves that we now understand the essential nature of thinking, consciousness, oneness, or anything similar, but instead will see how fundamentally limited our experience and reasoning capacity is and how much more room there is to grow them both. We could replace "hermetic" below with "polaric" and it applies just as well.

In so far as the intellectualisation of Hermetic philosophy is of the nature of commentary and corollary, it is legitimate and even indispensable. For then one will translate each arcanum into many univocal concepts—three for example—and, by this very fact, one will help the intellect to habituate itself to think Hermetically, i.e. in multi-vocal concepts or arcana. But when the intellectualisation of Hermetic philosophy pursues the aim of creating an autonomous system of univocal concepts without formal contradiction between them, it commits an abuse. For instead of helping human reason to raise itself above itself, it would set up a greater obstacle for it. It would captivate it instead of freeing it.)

[Cleric K]

Since several people already share that they find Martinuses spiritual science to be more accessible than the anthroposophical, I would like to point out a fundamental reason for this. Please understand right from the start that this is not some right vs. wrong confrontation. Things are very transparent as soon as we understand what we’re speaking of.

It all boils down to one of the most important questions that contemporary man has to ask himself:

How do I know?

Really, how Martinus knows? He was self-initiated, he experienced oneness and from then on answers began to flow. This is more or less how people envision clairvoyance. One gains access to additional perceptions and sees things there. Or doesn’t see anything but hears the answers ready served, as channelers do.

Habitually, this is also how things are envisioned for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It is assumed that the methods of initiation that Steiner disclosed are simply alternative means for achieving what can be also achieved by drinking ayahuasca, having a mystical experience, doing holotropic breathwork, sensory deprivation, OBE, NDE, etc. It is assumed that all that is needed is to achieve some form of non-ordinary state of consciousness and hopefully extract some concepts from the experience.

We can never comprehend the evolutionary place of spiritual science if we don’t feel as an urgent necessity that man needs a way of knowing reality and not simply patching up a metaphysical world conception.

The difference between having a metaphysical conception and approaching the actual states of being

Let’s take something like reincarnation. It makes sense, we can logically reason through it, it feels intuitively right but what would be the kind of experience which presents this as an immediate fact? Believing that we have been Napoleon in our previous incarnation can’t be taken seriously. The only way would be to seek the actual experience of the forms of consciousness in which man exists in the period between death and new birth. This is the key point. A spiritual science that can truly penetrate into reality has no other choice but draws upon the states of consciousness which are like those we go through between death and rebirth.

Even by merely stating this, a large portion of the audience already leaves the hall. It is really nothing but our materialistic heritage which has implanted the deep prejudice that it is fundamentally impossible to know anything about the states of existence through which we go after death (if there’s at all such a thing).

We really need to distinguish between having a metaphysical conception on our side of the veil and seeking the actual experience of reality across the veil. Let’s take the example of spiritual beings. Martinus speaks of them as forming a hierarchical chain. Eugene also speaks of nondual beings with which we live in the nondual worlds. But let’s shake off for a second all the accumulated conceptions and ask ourselves what would be the experience of interacting with these beings in the higher worlds? In our sensory life the only kinds of beings that we know are those that impress themselves into our senses. In a spiritual sense we know only ourselves. But what happens after death when we no longer have any sensory organs? What does it mean in that state to interact with a being? What does it mean to exist in that state? What do we experience?

If we don’t habitually brush off these questions, we’ll quickly realize how great of a void in knowledge we have. Of course, people today are quick to fantasize that after death we’ll feel like an orb of light and then other beings will be found as other orbs floating around. This however is nothing but a fantasy extrapolated from the experiences in the sensory spectrum. It is imagined that we still exist and feel much like in our Earthly ego state. We have our orb of consciousness, we move about, we look outside and perceive other orbs of consciousness, we interact with them, play with them, create with them and so on.

If one feels completely satisfied with such a conception then – and this is what the experiences on the forum show – there’s not much point to try to explain anything more..

The vital need for living knowledge

Life experiences should lead us to a point where we feel that such conceptions are nothing but Maya upon Maya. This should bring about a state of inner desperation where we like Solomon say “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” If we have never been pained by such an experience we simply have no chance to understand the deepest spiritual need that any true spiritual science is supposed to fulfill. If we’re perfectly happy with vain patched up decoration in our soul interior, then it is like spiritual science offers us a kind of food for which we don’t even comprehend that a corresponding hunger may exist.

So this is a kind of point of departure. When we hear something like angel, archangel, archai, we should observe what we’re doing with our thinking when we conceive of these beings. Interaction with a human being is something completely experiential. We can describe in the greatest details how they feel to the touch, to the sight, to the taste, how our thoughts and feelings are stirred when we interact with them. But what does it mean to interact with an angel? Obviously we can’t touch and see it. Maybe we can see a dreamlike image of a winged creature but is this the angel or is it the impression that our soul constructs for something which is not sense perceptible at all?

We can only understand the evolutionary place of athroposophically oriented spiritual science if we have reached the point to feel the vital need to understand such things. It is anthropo- (related to the human being) because this knowledge grows together with self-knowledge. By understanding what we are, we also understand the world and vice versa.

Spiritual science is not a concrete teaching but the living reality that can meet our vital need

Please try to decouple this from the persona of Steiner. The need to have real experience and understanding of our states of existence beyond the threshold of death is something that a soul can feel vital need of even if it has never heard about Steiner. If we don’t understand what spiritual science brings into the world we’ll inevitably see it only as another cosmology. Then we have Martinuses cosmology, Steiner’s cosmology, Seth’s cosmology and so on. But in the case of spiritual science the primary aspect is the scientific method, the path of inner transformation of the soul. It starts with PoF and then goes on towards the experiences across the threshold. Then the cosmology is the result of these experiences.

We have to distinguish what our soul needs for its development from what the intellect desires for its own satisfaction

This has to be borne in mind. When we say that we find X’s cosmology more accessible it should be clear that it is more accessible to our intellect, it forms a more convenient picture that we can hold and contemplate in our mind. The reason spiritual science feels to be less accessible is because it is not so comfortable for the intellect and this was never the goal! We only have to remind what was said before: imagine a state where we lose all our senses, and the support of the brain. There’s no way on Earth this could be comfortable and accessible for the intellect! In fact, the intellect is no more in that state. Yet it is the only way we can gain true knowledge of reality.

We have to be perfectly clear for the difference between thinking metaphysically and having actual experiences in the higher worlds. The former is a great lure because we soon get the impression that just because we think about the foundational secrets of the Cosmos we are already there. This is especially true when we think about something like the Trinity. There's difference from the Earth to Heaven between thinking of X1,2,3 and the experiences in the spiritual world for which the concepts are only the dimmest pointers.

I hope this can be understood. Otherwise it’s like saying: “Spiritual science is overly complicated. I find the description of an angel as a luminous winged creature to be much more accessible. Steiner simply lacks the pedagogical skills and he overintellectualizes things. He speaks about an angel in the most complicated and confusing ways instead of simply drawing a picture of a winged being.” Alas, with such an attitude we ensure that we can never pierce the veil of Maya. What feels convenient and accessible is such only because it nicely fits our sensory habits. And this wouldn’t be so bad if these habits were not arbitrarily extrapolated beyond the threshold. In the Imaginative state it is still possible to experience an impression of an angelic being in the form of a winged creature but with the great difference that (if properly developed) we in no way mistake that image for the reality of the being. Instead, we’re fully conscious that this is an impression within our own etheric body of the supersensible interaction with a spiritual being.

Higher consciousness can only be developed on Earth

When things like these are taken into account it becomes transparently obvious that we can never pierce the veil of Maya by clinging to our comfortable sensory and intellectual habits. Neither does it helps to say “Well, there’s no need to strain. After death when the veil falls I’ll behold the spiritual beings in their true reality. On Earth I’m completely satisfied to have only an approximate dream picture.” Alas, as we have spoken so many times, this position rests on a specific over self-confidence. We believe that we already have the needed organization which makes it possible to be conscious of the spiritual beings after death. This however is by no means the case. It is like someone who can do calculations only by using pen and paper. He says “I don’t need to develop the forces which allow me to do calculations in my mind. I’ll do that after I lose the paper.” But just as little we’ll be magically able to do calculations in our mind if we suddenly lose the paper, so we find ourselves severely lacking in the spiritual world if we have never tried to conceive of an angel as anything more than a picture of a winged creature. Such pictures are nowhere to be found not long after death. Then what remains is utter confusion because we simply can’t recognize the reality of the angel. We can perceive that reality only if on Earth we have understood how the angel manifests in us.

Spiritual science can only be understood if we seek the states of consciousness from whence the descriptions proceed

This is what I wanted to point out. Spiritual science is difficult because we have to build intuition of the states of being that we exist in after death. This has to be borne in mind at all times when we read an anthroposophical work. The conceptions, if taken in isolation as a picture, are only secondary. When we read we have to always feel the vital question “What is the state of existence from whence these things can be perceived as facts?” A question that receives its answer not in abstract words but as an actual inner movement, as if we try to co-experience the facts together with the clairvoyant. And this is what distinguishes spiritual science because everything communicated is inseparable from the path that reaches these states.

It's not about right vs. wrong but about whether we feel the vital need

Now all this will probably once again provoke outrage and accusations of superiority. But before that I would invite anyone to ask themselves: “Do I really want to approach the experiences between death and rebirth in the most real way?” Please don’t answer hastily. We should be clear that many people are curious to hear something about the afterlife but in no way would try to seek the first-person experiences of these states (except in the most naive way by fantasizing blissfully floating orbs in Heaven). And this is somewhat understandable as it requires to voluntarily approach the experience of death and go through it while still on Earth.

So if we are to ever reach agreement on these topics we have to be clear what we’re comparing. It doesn’t take much to see that Martinus presents a cosmology, a testament. But we won’t find there the science of initiation. We won’t find the knowledge of how to be lifted from the senses and brain, then even from the etheric body and experience what it means to exist in a spiritual world where all reality consists of spiritual beings. If we snap back to imagine these beings as floating winged creatures and we don’t even sense that this is only a higher form of Maya, then we don’t yet understand what problem spiritual science gives the methods of solving. It will always feel that things are only unnecessarily complicated and could be depicted in a much more accessible way. We can complain about complicatedness only if we have never tried to approach the state we would find ourselves in once we detach from the support of the physical and etheric bodies. If we reflect on this even for a while we’ll be convinced how utterly different that state should be. Eugene would say that it is completely orthogonal. And in a sense this is true but it is not absolutely orthogonal. We simply need quite different skills if we are to move in and out of that state and be able to express in concepts and images the unique conditions there.

This is not said as a criticism of Martinus cosmology. There is a place for such pedagogy too. But if we’re speaking of spiritual science we need to understand that we’re dealing with different problems. If we don’t feel the deep need to know in the most real first-person way something of the kind of existence we lead between death and rebirth, this whole most important aspect of spiritual science will be simply missed and what remains would be an overly complicated cosmology which will be blamed on poor pedagogical skills.

[Federica]

I would say Thinking without Thought is loveless. But the absolute Divine is Love. It bears the eternal tendency of sacrificing itself into negative images, i.e. thoughts-perceptions. Thereby new evolving relationships are created. And when Thought becomes so isolated that it loses sight of Thinking, i.e. the thread which weave all be-ings into unity, then it freely develops the capacity to Love anew from within itself. Thought gives birth to loving Thinking. It might help to consider it at higher scale-relative domains, instead of what we are mostly familiar with (spatiotemporal concepts and perceptions). In esotericism, there is the concept of the 'upper gods' and the 'lower gods'. We can even say the upper gods are the thoughts of the lower gods.

Thus we see the most important event for the Earth was prepared in the old Sun, we see humanity prepared for the Christ through the ancient Hebrew civilisation. We see the Being who once separated Himself from the Earth and went to the Sun return to the Earth again; but we see too that He first revealed Himself to man in a mirrored image, so to say in a representation. Jahve or Jehovah is related to the real Christ just as the upper gods are related to the lower ones, he is the representation of the real Christ, and to those who see through things, resembles Him completely. Hence in a certain way we can speak of Jehovah-Christ, and in doing so light upon the true sense of the Gospels, which relate that the Christ Himself said: ‘If you would come to know Me, then you must know how Moses and the Prophets have spoken of Me.’ Christ knew well that when, of old, people spoke of Jehovah or Jahve, they were speaking of Him, and that all that was said of Jahve applied to Himself, as the mirror-image is related to its archetype.

That takes us into deep esoteric territory, but the point being that this polar relation persists even in the upper echelons of Cosmic life. Every aspect of reality is a polarity. One could overarch them all with Formlessness-Form (understanding these as forces), as Scott does. Ideation-Perception, Thinking-Thought, Spirit-Matter, Hot-Cold, Fire-Air, Water-Earth, North-South, East-West, etc. They all basically refer us back to same essential relation from different angles of experience or conceptualization. There can't be anything in our experience which is 'left over', i.e. which is unessential. The 'I' is that red thread running throughout which maintains the harmony-balance between the poles at all scales, in all domains of experience. If we polarize too much to Thinking, we are in reductive mysticism (even if the mystic calls the pole something other than 'thinking'), and if we polarize too much to Thought, we are in reductive materialism. So we do need to maintain the balance between them as we spiral towards the Good, the perfect archetype of Thinking-I-Thought.

Thank you, Ashvin, for all the valuable insights. I have to admit my head is spinning, metaphorically speaking. I guess the polarity I am most directly experiencing now is between writing and doing, and I should probably mind to keep it in better balance. But I can’t help adding these few more lines in reply to your comments:


I understand that Love cannot find true expression if all reality ever is perfectly lovable, and that, in some sense, nothing can be left out of a “polar world-mechanics”, but if we really bring to complete fruition that “Every aspect of reality is a polarity” it would also mean that there is no direction of evolution. It would mean that everything always counterbalances everything else, while reality as a whole is not moving in any direction. But reality IS moving toward a reabsorption of the material in the spiritual, am I wrong? I well understand that nothing is a left-over, and nothing in unessential, but if absolutely everything, in its right time-scale, is an eternally balancing polarity, if no aspects of reality ever get processed and progressively transformed, until they are completely transformed, what is evolution then? In this view the meaning of transformation at the top scale of reality - which equals evolution - would disappear, as the central point of the center of reality would remain static. But this is not the case!? So if Thought eternally balances Thinking, through the fulcrum of the I, it seems to me that it becomes impossible to find any larger sense or direction, at the highest frontier of the hierarchy. As of now I don't feel that meaning can exist in a microcosmically polarized/dynamic, but overall static reality…

[Federica]

Thank you so much for these precise replies, Scott. I find a clarity in your writing that really brings something unique to the discussions. I am adding a few comments in blue.

Scott, I don’t think there’s any translation issue (I’ve checked, Danish and Swedish are very similar). The translation is not beautiful, but it is accurate. In particular, the word “analysis” is the same (analyse) in Danish.

First, what is "its analysis"? Who's analysis? Maybe it's a translation problem. But mainly, I don't understand what he means by X3. Isn't the "result of [living beings'] manifestation and creation what he earlier said is impermanent, i.e., not eternal? The terminological issue here is to call "creating" a faculty of X1. Rather, I would say it is X1.

I would understand Martinus' word “analysis” as ‘qualities’, like the qualities of experience. So I believe he is saying: “That “something” that we call the I cannot in itself bear any qualities.” He means that qualities are proper to manifested phenomena only. The qualities of the created organism cannot identify the creator of the organism. I would further translate:

“The condition of eternity in which this “something” is, this condition is its quality (analysis). But this quality can only be nameless, and will then only come to expression as X1."

(...)
So I believe Martinus decides not to give any name to X1, in order to avoid equating it to a perceived phenomenon, or thing, with qualities. For this reason, X1 is the name-less and concept-less condition of eternity of the I.

Ok, though I would say it has many names (formlessness, emptiness, the void, concept-less).

Yes - but it remains to ascertain if "it" according to Martinus, or X1, is the same as any of these concepts (formlessness, emptiness, the void, concept-less)

X2 is X1’s equally eternal creating capacity. And just as X1-X2, as structure of the Godhead, is the origin(ator) of reality, so X1-X2, as structure of the I too, is the origin(ator) of reality. Reality therefore has to be referred to as X3.
X3 is the eternal result of the Godhead’s creating capacity, and also the result of the creating capacity of the I. And the living beings you and I are (constituted by the I with its created manifestations) acquire eternity by the fact that they are the same as the inseparable unity of the three Xs, just like the Godhead is the same as the inseparable unity of the three Xs.
(incidentally, here is where I think Eugene can find a more explicit "nondual touch and feel")

That was as for my attempt to clarify what I believe Martinus says.
As for your issue with the creator nor preceding creation, I don’t think Martinus states that the creator is prior to the created. Rather he says: the creator is eternal, the created is its impermanent manifestation.

Do you agree with Martinus? I don't. First, I see no reason to posit a formless X1, and then add to it a "creative capacity". I would just say there is creating. One then can note that creating is a polar activity, the mutual opposition and determination of formlessness and form.

I don't know if I agree with Martinus. My problem is, first, that I don't have a direct knowledge to match his cosmology with, and second, I also don't have the refinement needed to do what you are doing, and "philosophically fact-check" or streamline any idealistic conception.
My intuition about separation X1 and X2 is that creating without creator makes it impossible to establish a locus of intelligence. I get we can't anthropomorphize. Still, if we only say there is creating, what is the Godhead - a God without a head, dispersed across the undefined spectrum of "creating"?

You say: “without a created there is no creator” - no, because creating/thinking is a verb, an evolution, a time-immersion, off of, or out of, eternity.

While I would say that time and eternity are polar. And I have no problem with thinking of the Divine as a verb.

I am suspending any comments on polarity for the time being

You say: “there is only one ever-expanding Thought (Created), which is in polar relation to the power to Think Create), so I would say the latter is not prior to The Thought.” - I don’t think so. I don’t get the polar relation thinking-thought. Rather, thought is the arbitrary precipitation of thinking activity in the individual perceptual spectrum. Thinking has to die, become stripped of its creative living capacity, and fall into standard perception as hyper-fragmented and dry” thinking dust” mixed in, and smeared all over, the screen of our experience, together with the rest of our perceptual flow (feeling, willing, sensing). There is a structural imbalance between thinking and thought.

Strictly speaking (which I haven't always been doing) I do not name "thinking/thought" as the polarity. Rather I name the poles as "the power to think/thoughts", and "thinking" as the name for the polarity. The structural imbalance you speak of is because we perceive our thoughts as if they were isolated from all that they relate to, which is, in the end, everything. With higher cognition, or so I imagine, thoughts are not perceived as isolated, or at least not to the degree that they are in normal cognition.

I realize that... I have to reflect more on the thinking polarity. I appreciate this prompting.

I believe you are abstracting a supposed polarity thinking-thought as if it went parallel to the spiritual-physical polarity? But I don’t see any "one ever expanding Thought". Thoughts can only be fragmented. That’s why we have to keep them at bay, we have to keep the fragments out of the way, by concentrating on only one tiny point, and that’s the only way to trace back to the unity of thinking. Besides what Ashvin says about livingly inhabiting the meaning of polarity, maybe you hold this view because you have not tried to consider thinking as X1 (or X1-X2 if you prefer) ‘above’ (not prior to) all else, which includes the manifested-perceptual, which includes thoughts-pictures?

Well, I do consider thinking as the ontological prime, but, in my ontology, it is not 'above' all else. It is all else. Why should I think otherwise, if I add the idea of the One Thought? (Though, as I've said before, it might be better to say "ideational activity" rather than "thinking", as one tends to think of thinking as distinct from sensing, feeling, and willing.) And is not a purpose of concentrating on only one tiny point (by shutting up the many relations we already know) to reveal relations we don't already know (to archetypes, hidden prejudices, etc.)?

Yes, that thinking is "all else" in your ontology reflects your disagreement with Martinus' doubled ontological prime X1-X2. I am not sure whether you should think otherwise and why, but I can refer to the "dispersion of the Godhead'' mentioned above as one possible reason. Regarding your goal of concentration - shutting up known relations, to reveal relations we don't already know: I am not sure, I wonder if Ashvin agrees with this way to put it. I would say, no. It's not that more relations are brought into the cone of awareness through concentration. It's not an expansion of the realm of the One Thought. It's beyond thought. It's no-thought, no thought relations. It requires abandoning the relational mode altogether...

[AshvinP]

I would say Thinking without Thought is loveless. But the absolute Divine is Love. It bears the eternal tendency of sacrificing itself into negative images, i.e. thoughts-perceptions. Thereby new evolving relationships are created. And when Thought becomes so isolated that it loses sight of Thinking, i.e. the thread which weave all be-ings into unity, then it freely develops the capacity to Love anew from within itself. Thought gives birth to loving Thinking. It might help to consider it at higher scale-relative domains, instead of what we are mostly familiar with (spatiotemporal concepts and perceptions). In esotericism, there is the concept of the 'upper gods' and the 'lower gods'. We can even say the upper gods are the thoughts of the lower gods.

Thus we see the most important event for the Earth was prepared in the old Sun, we see humanity prepared for the Christ through the ancient Hebrew civilisation. We see the Being who once separated Himself from the Earth and went to the Sun return to the Earth again; but we see too that He first revealed Himself to man in a mirrored image, so to say in a representation. Jahve or Jehovah is related to the real Christ just as the upper gods are related to the lower ones, he is the representation of the real Christ, and to those who see through things, resembles Him completely. Hence in a certain way we can speak of Jehovah-Christ, and in doing so light upon the true sense of the Gospels, which relate that the Christ Himself said: ‘If you would come to know Me, then you must know how Moses and the Prophets have spoken of Me.’ Christ knew well that when, of old, people spoke of Jehovah or Jahve, they were speaking of Him, and that all that was said of Jahve applied to Himself, as the mirror-image is related to its archetype.

That takes us into deep esoteric territory, but the point being that this polar relation persists even in the upper echelons of Cosmic life. Every aspect of reality is a polarity. One could overarch them all with Formlessness-Form (understanding these as forces), as Scott does. Ideation-Perception, Thinking-Thought, Spirit-Matter, Hot-Cold, Fire-Air, Water-Earth, North-South, East-West, etc. They all basically refer us back to same essential relation from different angles of experience or conceptualization. There can't be anything in our experience which is 'left over', i.e. which is unessential. The 'I' is that red thread running throughout which maintains the harmony-balance between the poles at all scales, in all domains of experience. If we polarize too much to Thinking, we are in reductive mysticism (even if the mystic calls the pole something other than 'thinking'), and if we polarize too much to Thought, we are in reductive materialism. So we do need to maintain the balance between them as we spiral towards the Good, the perfect archetype of Thinking-I-Thought.

Thank you, Ashvin, for all the valuable insights. I have to admit my head is spinning, metaphorically speaking. I guess the polarity I am most directly experiencing now is between writing and doing, and I should probably mind to keep it in better balance. But I can’t help adding these few more lines in reply to your comments:


I understand that Love cannot find true expression if all reality ever is perfectly lovable, and that, in some sense, nothing can be left out of a “polar world-mechanics”, but if we really bring to complete fruition that “Every aspect of reality is a polarity” it would also mean that there is no direction of evolution. It would mean that everything always counterbalances everything else, while reality as a whole is not moving in any direction. But reality IS moving toward a reabsorption of the material in the spiritual, am I wrong? I well understand that nothing is a left-over, and nothing in unessential, but if absolutely everything, in its right time-scale, is an eternally balancing polarity, if no aspects of reality ever get processed and progressively transformed, until they are completely transformed, what is evolution then? In this view the meaning of transformation at the top scale of reality - which equals evolution - would disappear, as the central point of the center of reality would remain static. But this is not the case!? So if Thought eternally balances Thinking, through the fulcrum of the I, it seems to me that it becomes impossible to find any larger sense or direction, at the highest frontier of the hierarchy. As of now I don't feel that meaning can exist in a microcosmically polarized/dynamic, but overall static reality…

Federica,

I want to be clear that if these metaphysical considerations become an obstacle for the growth of our ongoing spiritual scientific understanding, then we shouldn't pay much attention to them right now. You are entirely correct that, for all intents and purposes of our current first-person stream of becoming, we are on an evolutionary spiral which has definite tasks to fulfill. For ex., our plant nature and our human nature form a polarity, with the animal nature as a transition, but we are certainly not trying to keep those natures balanced in the sense of living equally in the sleep or dream consciousness of plants and animals, with the latter's selfish instincts and passions. We are seeking to integrate the selfless life forces of the plant nature into our dead intellect, sublimate the animal passions, and more fully develop the human nature of wakeful I-consciousness. So, once we get further into the concrete details of our current stage, the metaphysical considerations are only secondary at best, and can often become more counter-productive if we hold to them rigidly.

With that in mind, we could say that, from a higher-order thinking perspective, reality is also involving rather than evolving - forces are materializing rather than spiritualizing. In fact, our evolving perspective is only possible because others are involving. It really helps to consider that all of these rhythmic spirals occur simultaneously and we only tease them apart in our ordinary reasoning, which of course is necessary at first to gain higher resolution on the most proximate evolutionary developments behind us and ahead of us. Nevertheless, as we ascend to more living thinking and higher modes of cognition, it becomes easier to encompass them as something holistic. We begin to discern that our first-person experience only makes sense when understood as an interference of all these ascending-descending forces. These considerations help us understand the current state of our psycho-physical organization, for ex. As always, they should be held loosely (not rigidly) as an overarching context and allowed to work into our feeling life, so we gradually accustom our thinking organism to encompass new living habits. 

Let us consider the senses in their successive stages. There are in fact twelve senses. 34 Of these, five are already physical and two others will become physical during the further development of the Earth.

The five senses which we already have are smell, taste, sight, touch and hearing. In time man will develop two other senses into proper physical senses. These two are located in the pituitary gland (hypophysis) and the pineal gland (epiphysis). These will develop the two future senses in the physical body which will then have seven senses. To understand the successive stages of the senses we must make it clear that in so far as man is a being conscious of self, he is on a descending curve. So though the body is on an ascending curve, the senses are on a descending curve.

... so that when we are at a particular moment of our development we can always say: Yes, there are certain forces there that draw into man and pass out of him, forces that descend and forces that rise. For every such force there is always a moment when it changes from a descending to an ascending force. All forces that become ascending forces have been at first descending. They descend down to man, so to speak, and in man they achieve the strength to rise’. In this sense ‘when the body is on the ascending curve the senses are on the descending curve’ should be understood as meaning that the physical body in general is on the rising curve because it has passed the deepest point of its material densification, while the senses are on the descending curve since there are two senses which still have to develop as physical senses.

Also, when we speak of what 'reality as a whole' is doing, I feel it invariably leads us into a 3rd person perspective which is unhelpful. Either that or we will drive ourselves insane trying to encompass the higher-order dynamics of time and eternity with our intellect. Whether reality as a whole remains 'static' or is in 'movement' is besides the point for me, because those concepts have little relevance beyond our current stage of evolution. For all intents and purposes, there is a dynamic interplay which leads to wave after wave of development, sacrifice, and rebirth.