The Mask (1994 film) related to The Magic Consciousness Structure

[Federica]

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.

(...)

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?

Thanks for elaborating, Luke. You are raising a multitude of questions!
Luckily, Ashvin has already written an extensive reply with plenty of ideas to research and ‘try out’, like a cloth for the soul. So, in this reply, I will attempt to share a few simple thoughts from my personal work in progress, in case they might resonate somewhere close to your current questions. There are clearly many angles of approach to the questions you raise. But regardless of what angle we consider, there is one thought that should color all possible angles of approach. I think of this thought as a sort of 'intention keeper', that we can try to maintain by our side all throughout our explorations of questions such as: what is the Christ impulse, or the Luciferic, or the Ahrimanic one. The thought is: all angles begin, develop, and end inside our inner perspective.

There’s this constant correspondence. And even when we are clueless about what that means in concrete terms, it’s still important, all throughout our reflections, to keep at least one tiny piece of our attention busy with the background task of “trying to grasp in which sense this relates to me”. In other words, we don’t want to “sit back and enjoy the trip", movie, concert or story of the knowledge we are about to learn - say, the Christ impulse, or anything else. Rather, we want to prepare to actively search and discover these things within ourselves.

We need to do that because not only we, in our overall constitution, are an accurate mirror, a fully connected thumbnail, a ‘child theme’ (disregard this one metaphor if it doesn’t speak to you), in other words a microcosm of everything else that exists - spiritual and physical - but also this mini-reality that we are is our only chance to take valid steps towards knowledge, realization, consciousness. But not in the sense that we attain knowledge of reality by sort of psychoanalyzing ourselves. It’s much much larger than that. It’s just that our existence, inner and outer, is the ever-present passageway to real understanding of anything. Every time we take a further inquisitive step on the path, we have to keep our direct experience in the loop, and actively link back to it, in iterative process. Not a problem if one is almost completely clueless about the how (how can all knowledge be experienced as immersion, and not as mere comprehension?). For my part, I’ve started with only a faint sense of the centrality of this approach. But it soon begins to make some more sense, as long as we keep an expectant eye on this possibility.


Your question about impulses - the adversarial ones, as well as the impulse of Love (the Christ impulse) reminds me that I was recently reading in a lecture that Steiner calls a misfortune, or a calamity, the case of someone whose karma does not entail a possibility to know Christ. Thus what we are doing, here and now, with this discussion, is in itself a fortunate circumstance. We are lucky that more or less recently, these thoughts and questions have made their way into our life, all of us who are participating here. By the way, this thought is also a very basic way to start operating that connection between objects of knowledge and inner experience, because we can try to experience, to clothe our soul with the thought: “What might be the significance of this impulse in the present moment of my existence?” maybe trying to take a bird’s eye view of our life - not a spacewise bird view, but a ‘timewise’ one.


Now, one possible angle to grasp something of the nature of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic impulses in one mental picture is to “place” them on the Cartesian plane that Cleric used to illustrate the hysteresis process. I’m sure you read that foundational post series, The Central Topic and The Center of the Central Topic 1,2,3. This angle has helped me, however, the same caveat given in that post (TCOTCT 1), about the risks of taking that illustration as an intellectual model, is applicable here.


The axes of that illustration represent the two thinking modes that we can have, pushed to their extreme. We can think about an object (horizontal axis) or we can try to explore the nature of activity itself, the pure activity of thinking, devoid of any object (vertical axis). We cannot be in both modes at the same time, because as soon as we try to look at our activity of thinking while it’s in progress on an object (=when we try to consider a thought), we have to 'exit' the object, and instead, we have to put at the center of our thinking: “I was thinking about X”. This is of course not the same thing as thinking of the object directly. So we can realize experientially that there is a polarity there. Either we engage our thinking activity in an object (we condense it in a thought) or we stay away from content, and we try to sense the supersensible, vertical quality of the activity itself, by dropping all contents, seeing where it leads us, how it elevates us. Now, if you had to assign these two modes of thinking one to Ahriman and one to Lucifer, how would you go about it? A few associations may help:

- Horizontal axis:

thought, materialism, physicality, space, darkness, manyness, open information, bottom-up

- Vertical axis:

thinking, mysticism, escapism, time, light, oneness, private wisdom, top-down


There are clear patterns. Now, it may seem like the vertical extreme is 'less bad' than the horizontal, but in fact, both are equally divergent and adversarial to the equilibrium that we should seek at the balance point of all the pairs mentioned above. We have to spiral both extremes in the middle. We can’t escape matter to understand spirit, we can’t reject the maniness of the world and hope for a fast track to heaven and oneness, etcetera. So our ‘sweet spot’ is to be found along the diagonal on this plane, and to conclude with an even more basic, rudimental image, one could maybe say that, if we now imagine a new vertical plane, orthogonally intersecting the flat Lucifer-Ahriman plane along this balanced diagonal, we could draw higher and higher progressive approximations of the the Christ impulse, on the upper half of this new plane (if it makes any sense )

[LukeJTM]

Sorry, Luke, I accidentally edited your last post when trying to quote and respond to it. I am not sure there is any way for me to recover your post now.

Do you happen to have a draft or copy of it? Some of it is captured in my response, but not all of it.

[Federica]

Hi guys,

I just want to share something which I think could create an insightful discussion. It is about language in relation to the perception of color, and correlations this has with the human being's degree of self-consciousness. Let me know if anyone has something to share, particularly if the article about the Greeks implies (spiritual) 'mutations' or evolution of consciousness (I think there is definitely something to it).

The first source is an article about the ancient Greeks having no word for "blue", with some mention about other ancient cultures or their languages having no word for "blue." I will also post an excerpt from Jean Gebser, who wrote about something extremely similar in old Chinese literature. But, first here is a short excerpt about the ancient Greeks:

The Color Blue in the Ancient World

Surprisingly, the word ‘blue’ is simply missing from nearly all other ancient languages. There is no distinct word for the color in Chinese, Hebrew, or Sanskrit. Rather, the color that we call blue is usually grouped in with other colors, such as green.

Egyptians, however, did have a distinct word for the color blue, and not surprisingly, they were one of the only ancient peoples who began creating blue dye very early on in their history.

In the history of nearly all languages, the word for blue emerged much later than other colors. Through careful examination of ancient texts, linguists have discovered that almost all languages followed a fairly standard timeline of when names for distinct colors were introduced—black and white are the most ancient color names, followed by red.

In general, the way colors are referred to in Ancient Greek differs greatly from most modern conceptions of them.

Rather than describing a specific color, ancient Greeks frequently referred to the shade or tint of the hue instead, considering colors on a shade from dark to light.

Here is the full article: https://greekreporter.com/2023/04/25/di ... -see-blue/

Now, interestingly, in Jean Gebser's The Ever Present Origin he wrote about very similar findings from ancient Chinese texts, which happened to illuminate the meaning of a peculiar quote from Plato. The context is about what he called the archaic consciousness structure, in case anyone wonders what he means when he mentions the term. Anyway, here is the relevant excerpt about colors:

We have found only two direct and precise statements in sources of the type considered adequate by our age that bear on and indirectly characterize the archaic structure. They originate at the close of the Chinese mythical era, in what is perhaps our oldest tradition. The first is Chuang-tzu’s statement: “Dreamlessly the true men of earlier times slept,” which may be regarded as a key to the understanding of the archaic structure of existence.?? With reference to his own time (ca. 350 B. c.), he expressly states: “In sleep the soul engages in intercourse.” On the basis of old commentaries, translator Richard Wilhelm has emended the saying to include: “And thus the dreams are born from which the holy man of calling is free.” Since dreams are one of the manifestation forms of the soul, dreamlessness suggests its dormancy. In this sense the early period is that period when the soul is still dormant, and its sleep or dormancy may have well been so deep that even though it may have existed (perhaps in a spiritual pre-form), it had not yet attained consciousness. Yeta further implication of the statement cited is the emphatic absence of dualistic opposition in archaic man; only a world which has lost its identity contains the possibility of the reciprocal nature of any intercourse.

Two especially revealing words in Chuang-tzu’s statement deserve particular attention. It is significant that one of the greatest sages of China does not demean early men with the words “‘primitive men” (as would a contemporary European, caught up in scientific hubris), but rather calls them “true men,” which the commentator designates as the “holy men of calling.”” We emphasize this wording since the archaic structure in our sense is by no means “primitive.” Anyone who regards contemporary “primitives” as representatives of this structure denies the essential basis of his own humanity. The contemporary “primitives” no longer live in the archaic, but ina more or less deficient magic structure. Their predominantly magic attunement has become to a great extent devitalized, and their magic comportment becomes deficient the moment they come into contact with Europeans.

The second item of evidence bearing on the consciousness state of the archaic structure, which from a contemporary vantage point is inaccurately characterized as a state of non-consciousness, is found in an informative observation of Richard Wilhelm. In a note to his discussion of early Chinese chromatic symbolism, he writes: “At that time blue and green are not yet differentiated. The common word Ching is used for the color of the sky as well as of the sprouting plant.”33

If the non-differentiation, indeed the non-distinguishibility of archaic man from world and universe—a non-awakeness by virtue of which he is still unquestionably part of the whole—is evident at all in any of the extremely rare sources about the beginnings of mankind, then it is surely the case with the two statements cited. Dreamlessness means, beyond doubt, an unconcerned accord, a consequent full identity between inner and outer, expressive of the microcosmic harmony. identity of the sky and earth color certainly indicates unproblematic harmony and complete identity of earth and sky. (The possible objection that this may be a case of primitive color blindness is groundless. Application of such a concept here is tantamount to anachronism.) The identity of earth and sky is an expression of the macrocosmic harmony; taken together, microcosmic and macrocosmic harmony are nothing less than the perfect identity of man and universe.

From this vantage point, it is possible to illuminate an assertion of Plato which has baffled the understanding of not only Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, but of a host of other thinkers, some of whom have gone so far as to suggest textual changes via freely interpretative translations.#4 As quoted in Aristotle, the statement reads: “The soul . . . [came into being] simultaneously with the sky.”

The two Chinese examples adduced to characterize the archaic structures contain essentially the same Platonic thought; the sky, undifferentiated from the earth, is no more “existent” than the soul in dreamlessness. The awakening of the soul initiates the simultaneous awareness of the blue sky, since ‘the soul comes into being simultaneously with the sky.”

In retrospect, it may seem as though this consciousness mutation occu rringin man were directed toward us: toward present-day man and our consciousness structure; but we must guard against such a one-sided relativization of these events. Our present mode of thinking would insist that everything be considered from the vantage point of the present and would proceed to trace in reverse the path of events. Yet if we did this, we would draw conclusions and results from fragmented manifestations and would never reach the nearly inaccessible origin. Moreover, such a procedure would founder wherever the succession of events was interruped by mutation.

It is for this reason that we have attempted to avoid this retrograde mode of inquiry and have begun our investigations with the original structure and not the predominantly rational-perspectival structure of today (which no longer even corresponds to our actual consciousness structure). The observations of the Chinese and Greek sages which make previously unseen domains accessible, domains replete with extraordinary consequences, tell more about the archaic structure than would any of our retrospective conclusions or prognostications. Anyone capable of sensing and presentiating the significance of these utterances will at least be able to perceive some measure of the splendor of origin—the first radiance of the emergent world and man that suffuses these words of ancient times still present in us. Yet in so doing, we will fall silent.

Hi Luke,

I haven't read the Gebser quote yet, but I just want to immediately mention an old post where the question of the Greeks before Plato not seeing the color blue was touched on. The thread started as a commentary on the great essay by Max Leyf "the birth of the Self amidst archetypal polarities in the evolution of consciousness".

In the essay, with regard to the question of the Greeks’ blindness to blue, the author Guy Deutscher is referred to (note 17), and the book Through the Language Glass. Steiner also mentioned this fact, in this lecture. In short, the suggestion is the following, at least the way I understand it. Blue is the color of the unknown, the color of the darkness of the universe seen through the light reflected but the watery atmosphere of the Earth (as in Goethe’s phenomenological theory of color, different from the classical Newtonian theory of color. Newton postulated that the 7 colors of the rainbow are costituents of the ray of light, since he could 'extract' them from light through the prism. In fact, the phenomenological truth is that they are in our perception as observers).

When we see the blue sky, we are looking into the darkness of space, filtered by the daylight captured by the atmosphere. Blue is lightened darkness, as Goethe described it. Maybe one could say, blue for us has the quality of known (lightened) unknown (darkness). In otehr words, we know that we don’t know it. Hence the quality of blue is to elicit independence, autonomy, separation. Correspondingly, blue tends to recede from us as we look at it - we get such impression of coldness and distance. By contrast, red does the opposite, it jumps at us. This independence is necessary in order to dare to look into darkness through (spiritual) light, but the Greeks didn't have it, until Plato.

So until the fourth century before Christ, the physical eye of man - the Greeks’ in particular - didn't allow for the perception of blue, because Plato in human evolution marks the birth of the human Self. Prior to that time, man was one with nature, fused with it and with the gods, who were thinking through the human soul (this can be found in Barfield as well). Cleric described it so in this post: "for the Greek thinking still felt (as a slightly exaggerated analogy) as an unceasing stream of dreamy poetry. The soul could feel that it influences and steers that stream but it could by no means feel itself consciously responsible for the rhythmic rhymes that structure the stream (and the difficult thing to grasp is that the soul couldn't stand to the side and reason abstractly about this stream – anything that could be reasoned had to be experienced as intrinsically flowing on the waves of this mysteriously ordered stream, there was no 'secondary' stream that could think about the first)."

As illustrated in Leyf's essay, the ancient Greek poets never felt that their thoughts, their art, were their own individual creation. They felt themselves to be an expression of the agency of the gods, of "nature". They were one with it. Therefore, only after an individual, more independent human Self was born could the human eye stand the view of the dark, unknown expanses of the Cosmos, which we perceive ever since as what we call the color blue.

[AshvinP]

Hi guys,

I just want to share something which I think could create an insightful discussion. It is about language in relation to the perception of color, and correlations this has with the human being's degree of self-consciousness. Let me know if anyone has something to share, particularly if the article about the Greeks implies (spiritual) 'mutations' or evolution of consciousness (I think there is definitely something to it).

The first source is an article about the ancient Greeks having no word for "blue", with some mention about other ancient cultures or their languages having no word for "blue." I will also post an excerpt from Jean Gebser, who wrote about something extremely similar in old Chinese literature. But, first here is a short excerpt about the ancient Greeks:

Thanks for bringing attention back to this fascinating color phenomenon, Luke. The quote from Gebser is really insightful. It is a great example of how our mode of consciousness structures the perceptual landscape. I think Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche all commented on it as well. Zajonc also devotes a few pages to it in his book on our metamorphosing understanding of Light.

“The soul . . . [came into being] simultaneously with the sky." That also fits with the verse from Genesis after the Atlantean flood - “I have set My rainbow in the clouds, and it will be a sign of the covenant between Me and the earth." We know from esoteric science that Ego-"I" incarnated during the Atlantean epoch, but for some time the mode of consciousness was such that the atmosphere was permeated with fog and mist so that the Heavens could not be perceived with waking consciousness. Only after the Flood, i.e. after the dense mist condensed in response to the changing consciousness that formed the basis for our modern intellect, could the Sun's light permeate the atmosphere and humanity could begin to probe the Heavens in waking consciousness.

Along the lines of Federica's comment, this really helps illustrate the general principle of evolution and its advancement. When our "I" became more immersed in the physical sensory organism during our 5th epoch, the outer perceptual spectrum delaminated further so that we have a wider range of phenomenal relations to experience. On the other hand, the inner qualitative dimension of the outer spectrum actually laminates further, it gets more tightly merged together. In this way, we gradually lost much of the qualitative, holistic feeling of the outer phenomena that was experienced by our "I" when it worked more through the etheric life organism, as it did for most cultures of the 4th epoch. That was really necessary because our "I" simply wouldn't be able to fully extract the experiences offered by the physical sensory organism if everything was permeated by the qualitative spiritual currents.

As a crude comparison, we could imagine our sensory experience is always accompanied by music when we are walking outside. Not from an iPhone, but like a live orchestra is always with us, and the music morphs in real-time according to the perceptual landscape - the colors, the sounds, the smells, etc. There is no intellect commentating on the landscape with its rigid concepts, either, but only the flowing musical experience. This could give us some intimation of how we experienced outer phenomena in our ancient incarnations, i.e. deeply imbued with feeling and intention that flowed in rhythmic musical harmony with our stream of experience. The 'thoughts' streamed to us together with this experience - we didn't feel any desire or ability to mechanically reflect on the phenomena and attach thoughts to them. This is all pre-Homeric times.

Modern man is now in a position to recover that qualitative dimension of direct cognitive experience by retracing the etheric life forces (to begin with) that have been merged into the outer perceptual spectrum. In other words, we can delaminate the layers of our inner life so that the outer spectrum gains spiritual depth without losing its differentiated qualities won by the "I" on the physical plane. In this way, the "I" gains more and more qualitative depth from epoch to epoch as it retraces the spiritual forces that have gone into structuring the psychic, biological, and physical spectrums. Our current epoch is such that many individuals can also journey in advance of the general stream and help spiritualize the spectrums more effectively. Actually, it has always been the case that evolution was made possible by these advancing streams, but in our time the process has been more universalized so it doesn't only need to be a small cloister of initiates leading the way, feeding impulses into culture from the outside. Instead, the 'future' impulses can be attracted into culture and nature by each thinking individual who has freely chosen the path of the Cross.

[LukeJTM]

Thanks all for the replies. Fascinating.

I watched the video on Goethe's color theory, that was very informative, and I felt it was very profound too. Do either of you have recommended literature for understanding Goethe's color theory in more depth? I want to reason through this more myself.

Ashvin, does Jean Gebser's ever present origin go into more depth on the pre-Homeric consciousness (e.g. the 'stream' that didn't think about itself "from the side")? If I remember correctly, I only read about 3 chapters so far because it is such a dense book.

Federica, interesting about Plato marking the birth of the human Self. I remember that Jean Gebser mentioned this in the early parts of his ever present origin book. The cave was the ancient conception of space. Gebser also hints at something changing sigificantly in human thinking around the time that Christ and Christianity were appearing, which became reflected outwardly through architecture. You can read more about that in the quote (below).

Despite, or indeed because of, Euclidean geometry, there is no evidence of an awareness of qualitative and objectified space in early antiquity or in the epoch preceding the Renaissance. This has been indirectly confirmed by von KaschnitzWeinberg, who has documented two opposing yet complementary structural elements of ancient art as it emerged from the Megalithic (stone) age. 3 The first, Dolmen architecture, entered the Mediterranean region primarily from Northern and Western Europe and was especially influential on Greek architecture. It is phallic in nature and survives in the column architecture in Greece, as in the Parthenon. Space is visible here simply as diastyle or the intercolumnar space, whose structure is determined by the vertical posts and the horizontal lintels and corresponds to Euclidean cubic space.

The second structural element in von Kaschnitz-Weinberg's view is the uterine character of Grotto architecture that entered the Mediterranean area from the Orient (mainly from Iran) and survives in Roman dome architecture, as in the Pantheon or the Baths. Here space is merely a vault, a Grotto-space corresponding to the powerful cosmological conception of the Oriental matriarchal religions for which the world itself is nothing but a vast cavern.' It is of interest that Plato, in his famous allegory, was the first to describe man in the process of leaving the cave.

We are then perhaps justified in speaking of the "space" of antiquity as undifferentiated space, as a simple inherence within the security of the maternal womb, expressing an absence of any confrontation with actual, exterior space. The predominance of the two constitutive polar elements, the paternal phallic column and the maternal uterine cave-the forces to which unperspectival man was subject reflects his inextricable relationship to his parental world and, consequently, his complete dependence on it which excluded any awareness of an ego in our modern sense. He remains sheltered and enclosed in the world of the "we" where outer objective space is still non-existent.

The two polar elements which made up the spaceless foundation of the ancient world were first united and creatively amalgamated in Christian ecclesiastical architecture. (The symbolic content of these elements does not, as we will see p. 66 below, emphasize the sexual, but rather the psychical and mythical aspects.) Their amalgamation subsequently gives rise to the Son of Man, the duality of the column and tower, the vault and dome of Christian church architecture made feasible for the first time the trinity represented by the son-as-man, the man who will create his own space.

Understood in this light, it is not surprising that around the time of Christ the world of late antiquity shows distinct signs of incipient change. The boldness and incisive nature of this change is evident when we examine the Renaissance era that begins around 1250 A.D. and incorporates stylistic elements that first appear around the time of Christ. We refer, of course, to the first intimations of a perspectival conception of space found in the murals of Pompeii.§ Besides. their first suggestions of landscape painting, the murals are the first examples of what has come to be known as the "still life," i.e., the objectification of nature already expressed in the Roman garden designs of the same period and heralded by the pastoral scenes of late Bucolic poetry such as Virgil's Ecloges, it was principally by incorporating these novel elements of ancient culture and realizing their implications that the Renaissance was able to create the three- dimensional perspectival world from a two-dimensional and unperspectival culture.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, does Jean Gebser's ever present origin go into more depth on the pre-Homeric consciousness (e.g. the 'stream' that didn't think about itself "from the side")? If I remember correctly, I only read about 3 chapters so far because it is such a dense book.

Luke,

Yes, I believe he does when discussing the archaic and magical modes of consciousness. Actually, an interesting distinction occurred to me when you mentioned 'from the side' and shared this quote from Gebser:

Understood in this light, it is not surprising that around the time of Christ the world of late antiquity shows distinct signs of incipient change. The boldness and incisive nature of this change is evident when we examine the Renaissance era that begins around 1250 A.D. and incorporates stylistic elements that first appear around the time of Christ. We refer, of course, to the first intimations of a perspectival conception of space found in the murals of Pompeii.§ Besides their first suggestions of landscape painting, the murals are the first examples of what has come to be known as the “still life,” i.e., the objectification of nature already expressed in the Roman garden designs of the same period and heralded by the pastoral scenes of late Bucolic poetry such as Virgil’s Ecloges. it was principally by incorporating these novel elements of ancient culture and realizing their implications that the Renaissance was able to create the three-dimensional perspectival world from a two-dimensional and unperspectival culture.

We often mention how we need to reorient our thinking to the 'first-person perspective' on this forum, and I suppose one could easily imagine that refers to the 'perspectival conception of space' referred to above. Perhaps the first thing we do when hearing that is to try and connect all ideas to how we perceive the world around us 'in perspective'. But that is not quite right. We will notice how that modern experience of perspective leaves the subject doing the perceiving out of the picture since the eye cannot perceive itself, which leads to just what Gebser described above - the objectification of nature. So that is what results from the 'first-person perspective' in the strictly outer perceptual sense. It causes one to begin conceiving the World Content 'from the side' as if the thinking subject is detached from that WC and passively observing it without any influence on its evolving structure. Then it supposes a sense of 'reality' is attained when all the outer perceptual details are modeled accurately, i.e. the relations of number, weight, and measure are all represented as how they appear to our immediate perception.

That approach is exemplified in the birth of modern perspectival painting, such as below. 





Of course, there is nothing wrong with this - in fact, it really makes us feel like our images take on a sense of reality, a sense of be-ingness. That is the fruit of our objective consciousness on Earth, where the sensory domain becomes a reflection of the highest invisible forces of Be-ing. When we refer to the 'first-person perspective', however, it is something quite different - it is about remembering the inner life of the subject who is doing the perceiving-thinking, and then experiencing our "I"-perspective as always straddling the space between holistic ideas and relatively fragmented perceptions (including inner perceptions of thoughts, feelings, desires). It is from that reoriented perspective that we begin to discern the higher-order qualitative 'laws' that are always working into our normal perceptual experience, but aliased by our 'perspectival' assumptions and desires.

Interestingly enough, once we reorient in this way, the earlier mages that were relatively 'unperspectival', with flattened space and exaggerated proportions, gradually begin conveying their deeper meaning for us. For ex. this one:



Mosaic in the apse of the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, 6th century (Ravenna, Italy)


If we approach something like this with more 'watery' imaginative thinking, we may start to feel like it is even more representative of 'reality' than the perspectival paintings of the modern age. The latter simply wanted to capture all the outer perceptual details as they appeared, but forsook the inner meaningful and moral dimensions of those appearances in the process. Something like the above could capture the moral imagination that man is the crown of creation, intended to be the 'good shepherd' of all the other kingdoms that leads the latter into the spheres of higher potential.

Just as natural laws govern the physical domain, moral (karmic) laws govern the spiritual domain. This is the great polarity that leaves us feeling like dualized beings - 'half' of our existence is us wading in the waters of natural laws and the other 'half' is our head above the waters in the domain of ideas-ideals. It is what makes us experience the latter as subjective, fleeting, lacking a sense of reality, dry, abstract, etc. Through ideas, we gain a sense of insight or truthfulness about our experience, but we lack all sense of reality. Through sense perceptions (colors, sounds, smells, textures, etc.) governed by natural laws, it is the polar opposite - we gain a sense of concrete reality, of be-ingness, from encountering them but they don't give us holistic insight. Our thinking is what bridges the two domains by perceiving how one relates to the other. 

The morality connection to our life of spirit (thinking-will) and soul (feeling, desires, etc.) is pretty obvious - clearly, the way we think, feel, and act in the World has moral implications and we have no trouble experiencing that connection in our daily life (if we are paying at least some attention, which is rapidly changing). But the moral connection to our life and physical spaces, from which we get our 'natural laws' through thinking, has been lost. So we experience lawfulness in these spaces but no moral significance, while in the soul-spirit spaces, we experience moral significance but no lawfulness (which has only recently begun to shift as reflected in psychology, cognitive science, etc., although this still remains mostly abstract rather than intimately experienced). Through the portal of imaginative and higher thinking, these two domains can spiral together so we sense the lawfulness (the sense of reality and be-ingness) in the soul-spirit domain and we sense the moral significance of the perceptual domain. We are at a critical juncture where we could either integrate these domains or start to lose the sense of morality in the soul-spirit domain and the sense of reality in the perceptual domain. 

If we manage to spiral them together, however, then we may discover a new unsuspected form of art that integrates perceptual perspective with inner qualitative significance, such as that generated in Waldorf schools.

[AshvinP]

Unfortunately I do not have a draft, Ashvin. However, what I wrote is still fresh in memory. I will just write what I wrote the best I can remember, and paste in the parts you quoted above. I will also include the Gebser quote that I used.

Fortunately, Federica managed to capture your original post in a screenshot. I have re-edited the post back to the original and edited my subsequent post to become the response. I will also delete your last post, so it will be as if this never happened (except for this post...)

[LukeJTM]

Unfortunately I do not have a draft, Ashvin. However, what I wrote is still fresh in memory. I will just write what I wrote the best I can remember, and paste in the parts you quoted above. I will also include the Gebser quote that I used.

Fortunately, Federica managed to capture your original post in a screenshot. I have re-edited the post back to the original and edited my subsequent post to become the response. I will also delete your last post, so it will be as if this never happened (except for this post...)

Alright, no worries

I have read your reply but I will give it a re-read later to make sure I am fully understanding it.

[Federica]

Thanks all for the replies. Fascinating.

I watched the video on Goethe's color theory, that was very informative, and I felt it was very profound too. Do either of you have recommended literature for understanding Goethe's color theory in more depth? I want to reason through this more myself.

Ashvin, does Jean Gebser's ever present origin go into more depth on the pre-Homeric consciousness (e.g. the 'stream' that didn't think about itself "from the side")? If I remember correctly, I only read about 3 chapters so far because it is such a dense book.

Federica, interesting about Plato marking the birth of the human Self. I remember that Jean Gebser mentioned this in the early parts of his ever present origin book. The cave was the ancient conception of space. Gebser also hints at something changing sigificantly in human thinking around the time that Christ and Christianity were appearing, which became reflected outwardly through architecture. You can read more about that in the quote (below).

Despite, or indeed because of, Euclidean geometry, there is no evidence of an awareness of qualitative and objectified space in early antiquity or in the epoch preceding the Renaissance. This has been indirectly confirmed by von KaschnitzWeinberg, who has documented two opposing yet complementary structural elements of ancient art as it emerged from the Megalithic (stone) age. 3 The first, Dolmen architecture, entered the Mediterranean region primarily from Northern and Western Europe and was especially influential on Greek architecture. It is phallic in nature and survives in the column architecture in Greece, as in the Parthenon. Space is visible here simply as diastyle or the intercolumnar space, whose structure is determined by the vertical posts and the horizontal lintels and corresponds to Euclidean cubic space.

The second structural element in von Kaschnitz-Weinberg's view is the uterine character of Grotto architecture that entered the Mediterranean area from the Orient (mainly from Iran) and survives in Roman dome architecture, as in the Pantheon or the Baths. Here space is merely a vault, a Grotto-space corresponding to the powerful cosmological conception of the Oriental matriarchal religions for which the world itself is nothing but a vast cavern.' It is of interest that Plato, in his famous allegory, was the first to describe man in the process of leaving the cave.

We are then perhaps justified in speaking of the "space" of antiquity as undifferentiated space, as a simple inherence within the security of the maternal womb, expressing an absence of any confrontation with actual, exterior space. The predominance of the two constitutive polar elements, the paternal phallic column and the maternal uterine cave-the forces to which unperspectival man was subject reflects his inextricable relationship to his parental world and, consequently, his complete dependence on it which excluded any awareness of an ego in our modern sense. He remains sheltered and enclosed in the world of the "we" where outer objective space is still non-existent.

The two polar elements which made up the spaceless foundation of the ancient world were first united and creatively amalgamated in Christian ecclesiastical architecture. (The symbolic content of these elements does not, as we will see p. 66 below, emphasize the sexual, but rather the psychical and mythical aspects.) Their amalgamation subsequently gives rise to the Son of Man, the duality of the column and tower, the vault and dome of Christian church architecture made feasible for the first time the trinity represented by the son-as-man, the man who will create his own space.

Understood in this light, it is not surprising that around the time of Christ the world of late antiquity shows distinct signs of incipient change. The boldness and incisive nature of this change is evident when we examine the Renaissance era that begins around 1250 A.D. and incorporates stylistic elements that first appear around the time of Christ. We refer, of course, to the first intimations of a perspectival conception of space found in the murals of Pompeii.§ Besides. their first suggestions of landscape painting, the murals are the first examples of what has come to be known as the "still life," i.e., the objectification of nature already expressed in the Roman garden designs of the same period and heralded by the pastoral scenes of late Bucolic poetry such as Virgil's Ecloges, it was principally by incorporating these novel elements of ancient culture and realizing their implications that the Renaissance was able to create the three- dimensional perspectival world from a two-dimensional and unperspectival culture.

Luke,

It’s a very interesting quote, thanks so much for posting it, it reminds me that I shouldn't leave this book unread! Gebser’s architectural comments are actually adding for me a layer of clarity on projective geometry (PG), a topic that we have recently touched upon on the forum. PG is a more expanded and more encompassing understanding of space, compared to Euclidean geometry. It has some preludes in antiquity, but was really elaborated from the Renaissance on. PG is strongly connected with architecture and visual arts, and with the growth of the newly born human Self, through Renaissance and beyond.

I think what Gebser says about the “rise of the Son of Man” - the emergence of three-dimensionality from foundations that appeared at the coming of Christ and then fully blossomed in the Renaissance perspectival conception - invites us to understand PG and its artistic applications as the following key spatial concept (after the 3D understanding that made possible the representation of the Trinity) taking over from Renaissance onwards and accompanying further the evolution of human consciousness.

So, as we learn in the quote, the synthesis of masculine and feminine concepts of space - expressed in church architecture with both vault and column - marked the passage from two-dimensional to "three-dimensional perspectival understanding of the world". From there, I guess it could be said that the PG developed by Renaissance thinkers, architects and painters - resulting for example in the introduction of objective perspectival representation of space and distance in paintings - marked the subsequent step, in terms of evolution of human understanding of space: from 3D to the fourth dimension.

This is coincident with the evolution of consciousness towards ‘accessible’ esoteric knowledge, which appeared in the public sphere with Steiner as Anthroposophy, at the beginning of the 1900s. Indeed, Steiner made use of PG concepts, for ex. in the known lecture cycle on the fourth dimension.

Artistically, we could observe how this reinforced understanding of space effected by PG has manifested in parallel, opening to a representation of the 'fourth dimension', for example with the Dutch artist Escher and his “impossible world”, in the early 1900s. An allegorical illustration of his view of the world is represented in "Day and night", often showed by Cleric:



Other Escher artworks are more literally 'spatially expanded', like “Relativity”:


and “Ascending and descending”:





PS1
Regarding your question on Color Theory (I’m glad you liked the video) I’m sure Ashvin and Cleric know better. For my part I would refer you to Steiner’s illustrated lecture cycle on the topic.

There’s also this article and related YT video, but I haven’t read it/watched it.



PS2
References on PG:

Steiner’s lecture cycle on the fourth dimension

From the website Aether Force that Ashvin linked before:
https://icedrive.net/s/ZS5PCYhyXuYA3YVB4FTBwXj2PbTz

[Federica]

There’s also this article and related YT video, but I haven’t read it/watched it.

Luke,

I've now watched the mentioned YT series on Goethe's color theory by physicist Pehr Sällström. I think the videos are very good, with very helpful visuals. The series starts here: