LukeJTM wrote: ↑Sat Sep 02, 2023 10:27 pm
Federica, I think my confusion was cleared up when I had a re-think about what you and Ashvin said regarding the nature of time. But I will still try discussing further.
Rudolf Steiner's book Theosophy came to mind. He said in the spiritual world things are positioned together or attracted together according to their inner nature. I will put in a quote from him below.
An important difference between soul and physical processes can be expressed by saying that the reciprocal action in the processes of the soul is much more inward than in the physical. In physical space there reigns, for example, the law of impact. When an ivory ball strikes a ball at rest, the resting ball will move in a direction that can be calculated from the motion and elasticity of the first. In soul space the reciprocal action of two forms that encounter each other depends on their inner qualities. If they are in affinity they mutually interpenetrate and, as it were, grow together. They repel each other if their natures are in conflict. In physical space there are also definite laws of vision. We see distant objects perspectively diminishing. When we look down an avenue, the distant trees appear closer together than those nearby. In the soul space, on the contrary, all objects near or far appear to the clairvoyant at distances apart that are in accordance with their inner nature. This is naturally a source of the most manifold errors for those who enter the soul world and wish to be at home there with the help of the rules they bring from the physical world.
That makes sense to me. Everyone can relate that to things we experience through our life, for ex. relationships between people. We connect more easily with people who are similar to us, or we are drawn to people who are similar to us; people who aren't similar are repelled from each other. Or, when people are close in an emotional/mental sense, that is not a spatial closeness. It is the same when someone might say "we became distant over the years." The nature of those things make sense when connected with what Steiner said.
So I suppose that is connected with the idea of Time (Great Time, 'clairvoyant time') that is being discussed here. How is time connected with what Steiner said? I.e. things or beings attracted or drawn to one another by their inner nature(s). What makes the spiritual energies or processes temporal? Why are you calling them temporal? because it seems like you are speaking about something that is beyond time (the flow or sequence of experiences and events). Does that make sense?
One of the things I don't understand as much is the different 'impulses' connected with spirits. Ashvin mentioned, above, the 'Christ impulse'. I think he was trying to say, basically, that that impulse is about bringing the spiritual into the physical realm, or learning to discern the spiritual within the physical realm. Is that an accurate brief summary?
Rudolf Steiner spoke of two other 'impulses': beings of the darkness which he called Ahriman and Lucifer. I have a very basic understanding. Ahriman, I think his impulse appears as denial of anything spiritual, and cold, mechanical logic. Whereas Lucifer seems to be connected with escapism, or possibly denial of the material world, or getting lost in fantasies, but I'm not totally sure. And I think Christ is meant to redeem the other two, to bring them into the light or good.
Can elaboration be given on Lucifer? I don't understand that one as clearly.
Are these beings a single individual, or are they more like groups or collectives of spirits under a single name or identity?
Luke,
I would like to offer some additional thoughts here. At the conceptual level, I think the time-consciousness spectrum is the most helpful tool. Let’s take the example of someone we connect with at an emotional level during life. That connection is something temporally extended that unites many different physical events, such as meeting the person, getting to know them over several more meetings, working with them, living with them, or whatever the case may be depending on the relationship. If we wanted to conceptually map this out and describe perceptually every detailed event that went into this relationship, it would take a lot of time and many pages. And we experience it in our
thinking as something that unfolded over many years. Yet the whole string of events is sort of embedded within the intimate emotional connection we experience when
first meeting the person. It is there as a dim intuition-inspiration of latent possibilities that we cannot put into clear concepts. Our emotional soul-life lives in a much broader aperture of the past-future than our normal thought-life and sensory-life, in that sense. We should think of them all as superimposed, i.e. they are not following each other ‘in time’ but rather they exist simultaneously and the
relation between them is what determines our experience of time.
Now if we were to unite with others on the basis of shared living ideals that really stir up our life of will, that really motivate not only our thoughts and emotions but also our
deeds, then we are attenuated to a spiritual life that encompasses an even broader spectrum of events than our thought and soul life. These are the events that are structured by not only particular emotional relationships related to our temperament, character, etc., but entire physical destinies over a lifetime. They may relate to our family, our nation, our species, our geographical location, our climate, and so forth. All these factors bring people together and determine the overarching course of their lives – how they can physically develop, what they can experience, who they can meet, how they can move around, etc. When confronted by a person infused with such an ideal, we might say “this is that person's reason for existing [on the physical plane]” without realizing how literally that is true. Many of these factors were consciously chosen by us before incarnation.
(taken from previous post by Cleric)
The thinking, emotional, life, and physical spheres are all nested one within the other, mutually influencing each other, although the broader spheres generally structure the narrower ones in a
meaningful way, while the narrower ones provide valuable feedback as to what needs to be further perfected in the structuring activity. The importance of thinking (which first manifests at the intersection of the pyramids), however, is that it is the thread that runs through all spheres. The thinking I mentioned above that is fragmented into spatial frames is only that form of thinking conditioned by the physical senses and the isolated personality (which clearly has its uses for Earthly tasks, including moral development). Thinking as such, unconditioned by the senses and lower impulses, is what allows us to
become conscious of these layers of our being like we are starting to do right now on this forum and in these posts. Through our supra-sensory thinking here we are laying a foundation for a more intuitive experience that reintegrates the forces of feeling and will, freeing the soul and the body from their reflected and shadowy existence (microcosm). We are idealizing the latter so that they are experienced in their true nature as fractal images of an Earthly and Cosmic Soul and Body, i.e. a completely interconnected organism that comprises all other spiritual beings (macrocosm).
This act of becoming conscious and creatively taking hold of what otherwise takes its course and directs our destinies subconsciously is the heart of the Christ impulse. Here is another way to think about it. Normally we bounce back and forth between extreme states of being in order to balance out certain imperfections and evolve. In terms of temporal experience, we can say we are always oscillating between the past and the future, or the Earth where our physical life unfolds and the Cosmos where our spiritual life unfolds. That is the rhythm of waking and sleeping and reawakening, or birth and death and rebirth. This rhythm is so extreme that we can't normally remain conscious of the oscillation into the broader spheres of the spiritual world, but only the relatively isolated sphere of the physical context. Steiner gives a few examples here.
Steiner wrote:I might give you another example of the connection between physical and spiritual life. Let us take a concrete, individual example. Suppose we have told a lie to someone on the physical plane — I am speaking of actual cases. When we tell a lie to someone, it happens at a certain point of time and what I shall now describe as the corresponding event in the spiritual world also takes place at a certain point of time between death and rebirth. Let us suppose we have told a lie to someone at some particular time on the physical plane; then, during our sojourn in the spiritual world, be it through initiation or through death, there comes a certain time when our soul in the spiritual world is entirely filled with the truth we ought to have expressed. This truth torments us; it stands before us and torments us to the same degree in which we deviated from it when we told the lie. Thus one need only tell a lie on the physical plane in order to bring about a time in the spiritual world when we are tormented by the corresponding truth, the opposite of the lie. There the truth torments us because it lives in us and burns us, and we cannot bear it. Our suffering consists in our seeing the truth before us. But we are in such a condition that this truth gives us no satisfaction, no joy, no pleasure; it torments us. One of the peculiarities of our experience in the spiritual world is that we are tormented by what is good, by the things which we know ought to uplift us.
Take another example. In our life in the physical world we may be lazy in doing something which it is our duty to do industriously; then comes a time in the spiritual world when we are filled with the industry we lacked in the physical world. Industry most surely comes; it is alive in us when we have been lazy in the physical plane. The time comes when from inner necessity, we have to exercise this industry unconditionally. We devote ourselves to it entirely and we know that it is something which is extremely valuable; but it torments us, it makes us suffer.
What the Christ impulse allows us to do is, through our higher thinking capacity, bring more of the spiritual compensation into our waking consciousness during life on Earth. We may then be able to balance two states of being in a single incarnation that otherwise would only be balanced over the course of two incarnations. He is the
3rd factor - the true nature of our "I" - that allows us to 'triangulate' between the two extremes in a more harmonious way, so that we experience the whole process unfolding through the feelings of peace and joy and love, instead of suffering, bitterness, and resentment. He inspires us to creatively and courageously take hold of our destiny while we are on Earth. “
Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”
Steiner wrote:Let us suppose that a certain kind of illness attacks someone who has taken up Spiritual Science in the way described and it is in his karma that he may be cured. Naturally, it may be in his karma that the disease cannot be cured; but, when considering an illness, karma never under any circumstance says that it must run a certain course in a fatalistic sense, it can be cured or it cannot be cured. Now, anyone who has earnestly taken up Spiritual Science acquires an instinctive feeling which helps him to oppose the illness and its weakening effect with the proper remedy. That which in the ordinary way is experienced as the result of the illness in the spiritual world works back into the soul, and, in so far as one is still in the physical body, it acts as instinct. One either succumbs to the illness or finds within oneself the way to the forces of healing. When the clairvoyant consciousness finds the right remedy for an illness, it happens in the following way: such a clairvoyant is able to call up before him the picture of the illness. Let us suppose that he has the picture before him of the illness which approaches a person in such or such a way and has a weakening effect on him. Owing to his clairvoyant consciousness there appears to him the counterpart of the illness, namely, the corresponding feeling of health, and the strengthening which springs from this feeling. That which can now happen to man in the spiritual world as the corresponding cure for that from which he is suffering in the physical world, is perceived by the clairvoyant. Through this the clairvoyant is enabled to advise the man for his good. Indeed, one need not even be a fully developed clairvoyant, but this may appear to one instinctively from seeing the picture of the illness. But the cause of that which to clairvoyant consciousness appears as compensation in the spiritual world, belongs to the picture of the illness as much as the swing of a pendulum to one side belongs to the swing to the other side.
From this example you will see how the physical plane is related to the spiritual world and how fruitful for the guidance of our life here the knowledge of the spiritual world may be.
Now we also come to the question of Lucifer who, in our times, is a danger on the spiritual path because we must lean into his influence for the sort of consciousness mentioned above. Whereas Christ opens the portal to the spiritual so that we may
heal our fellow humans and the Earth, Lucifer entices us to abandon the latter and focus only on ourselves. We should understand these beings as more overarching spirits in whom our soul-life is nested. For example, Steiner gives a helpful image of Lucifer’s reality when speaking of the "being of philosophy". Our own development at a collective level is an image of his individual development, which again helps us approach the true nature of Time-experience – it is the
relation between different layers of our being. The reason that came about is generally because certain Angels did not complete their evolution on the previous incarnation of Earth – Old Moon - and therefore they must unite with the soul-life of humanity to evolve further (in contrast, Ahriman was an archangel who did not complete his evolution on Old Sun and in that sense has fallen even further behind his proper course of evolution).
Steiner wrote:You see from this that very many impulses of transformation as regards the spiritual life are coming forward in our time. For here we see something evolving that is like a human being except that it has a longer duration of life than an individual man. The individual man lives on the physical plane: for seven years he develops the physical body, for seven years the etheric body, for seven years the sentient body etc. The Being which evolves as philosophy (we call it by the abstract name ‘philosophy’) lives for 700 years in the etheric body, 700 – 800 years in the sentient body (the time is only approximate), 700 – 800 years in the sentient soul, 700 – 800 years in the intellectual or mind-soul and again 700 – 800 years in the consciousness soul. A Being evolves upwards of whom we can say: if we look at the very first beginnings of Grecian philosophy this Being has then just reached the stage of development which corresponds in mankind to puberty; as Being it is like man when he has reached the 14th – 16th year. Then it lives upwards to the time when a human being experiences the events between the 14th and 21st year; that is the age of Greek philosophy, Greek thought. Then comes the next 7 years, what man experiences from the age of 21 to 28; the Christ Impulse enters the development of philosophy. Then comes the period from Scotus Erigena up to the new age. This Being develops in the following 700 – 800 years what man develops between the ages of 28 and 35 years. And now we are living in the development of what man experiences in his consciousness soul: we are experiencing the consciousness soul of philosophy, of philosophical thought.
In the spiritual world after death, we become permeated with the wisdom of Lucifer and would be enticed to simply remain there with all our moral imperfections if it were not also for the progressive spirits led by Christ who show us that our full potential can only be reached through sacrificial activity for the advancement of all Earthly beings,
including Lucifer and Ahriman. It is then left in our complete freedom to decide whether we will act on that knowledge of our full potential. In that sense, all of us who are incarnate now have already chosen to follow the Christ impulse and help realize the full potential of Earth's evolution, but that reality is simply obscured by our day-waking consciousness. That obscurity has been necessary for us to focus on our Earthly tasks and complete them in freedom, without being completely overwhelmed by the bright light of spiritual reality - its overflowing wisdom - and also the darker impulses that live in our souls. The modern intellect is like an Ark in that way, shielding us from realities that would either inflate our ego in a limitless way or obliterate our ego when confronted with its lower nature, and carrying us through the complexities of the modern age. But now we can also gradually allow some of the spiritual light to filter into our waking consciousness and purify those lower impulses, which then creates a positive feedback that allows for us to take more and more creative and moral responsibility over our own destiny.