Understanding the Christ-being and His Significance for the Future of Humanity

[Federica]

It has been interesting for me how the so-called 'introductory' material is actually the most helpful for orienting my intuition for these profound esoteric realities even more. That is also true for Cleric's various illustrations on this forum. I'm trying to make a habit of always returning to these after venturing out into more diverse domains of spiritual science.

In connection with the lecture you shared above, here is another complementary angle to consider from Tomberg.

Yes, I also try to revisit posts and lectures to get a sense of how my understanding is changing. Thanks for this other angle on Christianity by Tomberg. Though I can't properly grasp all the meaning, I do appreciate the elevated perspective. I see the connection with the lecture, that creation and destruction are one, and how the resurrecting power of Love shines in the middle, the unifying principle of everything.

I should have included this section as well which introduces the above section:

***

WHEN WE STUDY the history of human cognition, we find that a problem runs through this history, as an unbroken thread, concerning the common source of the outer world and human consciousness. The cosmic Godhead in relation to the world and humanity was, and ever will be, the most important question for earthly humanity. Since the moment of the birth of thought this question has been answered in various ways. But, regardless of how manifold the answers to the question may be (apart from Atheism, which is a manifestation of spiritual disease rather than knowledge), they may ultimately be combined into three categories. The Godhead may be considered pantheistically, theistically, or deistically; it is the cosmic entity in itself, or it guides the universe it has created from outside, or it is the creative being at rest above the universe who, having created the world, has lost interest in its fate. In the first instance, we have the Godhead of all consciousness, enlightening the world and all life that flows through the currents of the world; in the second, we have the highest being with whom humankind is confronted; in the third, we have the transcendental originator of the cosmic system present in the cosmos, the same way a watchmaker is present in the constructed watch. These views depend on certain basic feelings that are peculiar to human souls in their views of life. One soul feels inundated and irradiated by the divine; another has the experience, as an independent being, of confronting the divine in free exchange; and yet another feels neither the flow of the divine in the cosmos nor its revelations in free interaction, but merely a memory of the divine as the rational principle that governs the universe. Those who hold these fundamental conceptions often stand in irreconcilable opposition, believing that the truth of their own view unmasks that of the other as mistaken. Thus, the pantheist views the theistic concept of God as anthropomorphic; the theist regards the pantheistic concept as naturalistic and vague; and both reject the concept of a deist (say, Voltaire) as an insubstantial abstraction. The deist, on the other hand, considers both the other concepts unscientific and philosophically unsound.

Tomberg, Valentin; Bruce, R.H.. Christ and Sophia: Anthroposophic Meditations on the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocalypse (pp. 130-131). steinerbooks. Kindle Edition.

I am stunned how insightful and clear this whole explanation is! Thanks Ashvin. Hopefully I'll not forget that. I feel that with these last two characterizations, by Steiner and Tomberg, I have made some progress in grasping our human relationship to the Divine, the nature of Christ, and how feeling is called to fill and substantiate the form outlined by these thoughts.

[Güney27]

A quick question.
There are anthroposophists who recommend imagining the important moments in the life of Jesus.
However, wouldn't it be bad to fill up with images of murder and violence?
Does it make sense to illustrate the other readings (lectures) as exercises?
I am currently reading a book by Steiner about the stages after death.
He says that these spheres go up to the planetary body. How can I phenomenologically examine these spheres that Steiner talks about,
how can I understand these spheres using the TC spectrum?

[Federica]

A quick question.
There are anthroposophists who recommend imagining the important moments in the life of Jesus.
However, wouldn't it be bad to fill up with images of murder and violence?
Does it make sense to illustrate the other readings (lectures) as exercises?
I am currently reading a book by Steiner about the stages after death.
He says that these spheres go up to the planetary body. How can I phenomenologically examine these spheres that Steiner talks about,
how can I understand these spheres using the TC spectrum?

Hej Güney,

Not to replace any more thorough and substantial upcoming replies to your question, but I just wanted to point to this post by Cleric that exactly addresses the second part of your question: "How can I phenomenologically examine these spheres that Steiner talks about, how can I understand these spheres using the TC spectrum?"

If I may add a thought to the first part of your question, for me it's clearly worthy, and even necessary, to strive to imagine the moments of the life of Jesus Christ. These are not images of violence as much as they are images of how human violence has been transmuted and redeemed, for the salvation of all humanity. That violence is our own violence anyway, not someone else's, and we absolutely need to face it, recognize it, and aknowledge it, in order to have a chance to redeem it in our own heart.

[AshvinP]

I am currently reading a book by Steiner about the stages after death.
He says that these spheres go up to the planetary body. How can I phenomenologically examine these spheres that Steiner talks about,
how can I understand these spheres using the TC spectrum?

Guney,

One can also understand the spheres that we journey through after death as the 'blueprints' for our body-soul-spirit structure and broad patterns of life events that will unfold during the seven-year stages of our development on Earth. Below is a diagram that maps some of the relevant correspondences. In the first 3 spheres of activity, we are building up our bodies in strict accordance with our past Karmic destiny so that they can become useful instruments for our soul-spirit when the latter fully incarnates into the bodies during the Sun stage. When we develop intellectual thinking, higher reasoning, and moral feeling-will during this Sun stage, we can begin creatively working into and shaping our Karmic destiny, i.e. fulfilling past karma and thereby unfolding our potential higher capacities. The last 3 spheres of activity are like recapitulations of the bodily and soul stages except at a higher level where we actively participate in transforming the soul-structure into higher spiritual faculties that will serve our development across the threshold. These are the same spheres of activity that we pass through after death, except during the latter journey we experience them completely inwardly, based on what we were able to accomplish on Earth, and in connection with humanity and the beings of the Cosmos as a whole. We thereby receive wise feedback on where we have arrived in evolution and prepare for a new incarnation in a corresponding way to further our inner perfection.

In terms of the TC spectrum, we could save the life stages are the decohered frames of the overarching holistic Idea of "inner perfection" that we experience between death and rebirth. Since we are normally unconscious of this relationship, our life frames often turn out to be severely distorted reflections of the overarching intents that we seeded with the higher hierarchies between death and rebirth. We may even work in the opposite direction of those intents because we feel some life event as being threatening and oppressive rather than an opportunity to spiritually grow and mature. If we are able to develop higher cognition and experience across the threshold during life, then we become more conscious of the relationship and gradually harmonize the Earthly activities with the higher intents. That is the overall purpose of our Earthly evolution.

[Güney27]

Thanks federica and ashvin for the help.
I noticed that I have the need to understand everything visually and sensually.
I try to understand the spheres of the solar system, which we pass through after our death, by visualizing them as external places through which we wander.
It's a problematic tendency because it keeps these things abstract (by abstract I mean that things are sought externally, not as an experience within one's own).

This tendency is hidden because it comes up every time I deal with esoteric writings.
And often I am not aware of it.
Do you have any advice on what I can do to counteract the tendency towards abstraction?

[Federica]

Thanks federica and ashvin for the help.
I noticed that I have the need to understand everything visually and sensually.
I try to understand the spheres of the solar system, which we pass through after our death, by visualizing them as external places through which we wander.
It's a problematic tendency because it keeps these things abstract (by abstract I mean that things are sought externally, not as an experience within one's own).

This tendency is hidden because it comes up every time I deal with esoteric writings.
And often I am not aware of it.
Do you have any advice on what I can do to counteract the tendency towards abstraction?

Güney,

For my part, I think that your need to visualize things in your mind's eye is not the same thing as abstraction, and you shouldn’t fight against it. Visualizing scenes from what we are reading or listening to, making them the external environment of our imagined cosmic adventures, is a positive tendency towards normal imagination, I believe. It's helpful, for example to understand images, analogies, or to create our own metaphors to explain things to others. Try to read any post from Cleric without this imaginative attitude, you will see, it's impossible

Let's say you are navigating through an imaginative flow, for example the spheres of the solar system. A tendency to abstraction here would be to take a snapshot of, say, Mars, tear it apart from that flow, and mentally archive it, as a separate piece, convinced that it makes sense to understand it by itself. If you say to yourself "Mars is explained for the moment, it's an object of knowledge that I can pin down by means of some facts and figures, and I can now move on to the next object of analysis", then you are abstracting. The abstraction does not come from the fact that you shape your thinking in form of visuals. It comes from the impossible wish to stop time, take a mind-snapshot of Mars, kill it by tearing it apart from its contexts (the easy-to-notice context of the solar system, and all the other contexts that we know are there, even if they are not yet clear) hoping that we can get things understood in this way. To ab-stract actually means to tear apart from.

However, if we keep in mind that the journey is a work in progress, only a preliminary exploration through one layer of a manifold, interconnected reality, then it's fine. If we have a sense of the richer, more manifold ways to understand that same journey, in connection with other aspects of reality that escape us at the moment - an inward perspective, an after-death perspective, and more - then it's fine, because we are keeping ourselves present in the imagination. We are holding it as a living process that is ongoing in that same moment, as an evolving thing, in time. We are having in mind both the rolling time of the imagined adventure, and our own rolling time as we imagine it. And even if we cannot yet connect these two flows, we know and trust the connection is there, as well as all the other connections that we don't yet master, but can sense. If throughout the exploration we have a sense that our 'walls of understanding' are like flexible walls of a bouncy castle, then I would think it's fine and even necessary to have the imaginative approach that you describe.

For example, for the solar system, and how it connects with our human history and our individual history, I am finding GA 11 - Cosmic Memory very beneficial. I think we can definitely imagine the descriptions provided there, for instance how the settlements of Atlantean humans were built, how water and air were different back then and how humans were making things from within the forces of nature, etcetera. This is not such an un-imaginable time ago. It's 'only' ten millennia. I believe it's good to try to imagine all that, and how it's different from our human experience today, how the comparison opens up dimensions of difference that we would never have conceived at first.

[AshvinP]

Thanks federica and ashvin for the help.
I noticed that I have the need to understand everything visually and sensually.
I try to understand the spheres of the solar system, which we pass through after our death, by visualizing them as external places through which we wander.
It's a problematic tendency because it keeps these things abstract (by abstract I mean that things are sought externally, not as an experience within one's own).

This tendency is hidden because it comes up every time I deal with esoteric writings.
And often I am not aware of it.
Do you have any advice on what I can do to counteract the tendency towards abstraction?

Guney,

I agree with what Federica wrote. I would add here that the spatial visuals are actually pretty helpful if we hold them as loose symbols for our continuously metamorphosing states of being through iterations of the TC spectrum. Spatializing the spheres is helpful in the following sense - we usually tend to think of everything in our lives following each other in a linear sequence of time periods. So we will conceptualize the post-death journey as something that sequentially follows our life on Earth and is sequentially prior to our next life on Earth. However, that is not really correct and rather it is superimposed 'on top' of our Earthly incarnations. During the day we cannot perceive the planetary and stellar spheres but we know that they are still there, and similarly, during our normal waking life we cannot cognize the post-death spheres but they are still present. They are still supra-consciously guiding the general course of our life according to the intentions that were seeded in the various spheres we pass through. We can also imagine it as a conelike structure that funnels down from the Saturn sphere to the Earth sphere. 





We should imagine that each sphere extends all the way down to Earth, so all of them are nested within the Saturn sphere. All of this is of course a representation of higher beings and their locus of ideational activity that serves progressive development, which we designate by the planetary names. The locus of human ideational activity is what we call Earth. The locus of activity of resistance to the progressive Divine intentions is what we could call the sub-earthly spheres. Our actual be-ing as body-soul-spirit spans the entire structure. We expand our inner being to encompass the 'size' of the entire Solar system after death, while during life on Earth we contract into the lower spheres insofar as we are tied to instinctive passions and immoral thoughts/deeds. The arrows indicate that we loop back during sleep and after death to experience what occurred outwardly on Earth from its completely inner moral dimension, where our objective environment becomes the consequences and significance of our deeds for other individuals, other collectives we were associated with, the whole of humanity, and the whole of the Earth's organism. We should be absolutely clear that there is nothing that looks like this spatial diagram within spiritual reality, but it is merely a symbol for an inner stream of development that leads to greater moral perfection.

[Federica]

Ashvin,

I have recently stumbled upon this channel. It seems good to me so far, but at the same time I don't know the Bible and I have no opinion about the quotes and the connections made with reference to Scriptures and Saints. I wonder if you are familiar with the channel? In which case what do you think about it? Thank you!
(If anyone else knows it, please say what you think)

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

I have recently stumbled upon this channel. It seems good to me so far, but at the same time I don't know the Bible and I have no opinion about the quotes and the connections made with reference to Scriptures and Saints. I wonder if you are familiar with the channel? In which case what do you think about it? Thank you!
(If anyone else knows it, please say what you think)

Federica,

It seems like a nice introduction to the esoteric dimension of scripture and early theology. We certainly find many esoteric layers of meaning in the Biblical writings and the early Church fathers and I think the quotes he provides are emblematic of that. There is really no fathomable limit to the depth embedded in such writings, much of which would have been unconscious to the writers themselves. It reminds me of Blavatsky's teaching of 7 keys of interpretation for every esoteric symbol or text.

On the other hand, I notice the channel has a video on "yoga is the dissolution of mental activity" and another on "ego death". So we might want to be careful there. I am not sure if or how aware the video producer is of the 'modern yoga' of Steiner, Scaligero, et al. where the esoteric dimensions are explored not through dissolution but through the focusing of spiritual activity, retracing concentrated thought-forms to the higher-order spiritual activity concealed in them. This is really the most important thing for penetrating into the depths of the Biblical and ancient wisdom texts and traditions. Otherwise, the 'esoteric' understanding remains mostly conceptual and flattened.

[Federica]

Federica,

It seems like a nice introduction to the esoteric dimension of scripture and early theology. We certainly find many esoteric layers of meaning in the Biblical writings and the early Church fathers and I think the quotes he provides are emblematic of that. There is really no fathomable limit to the depth embedded in such writings, much of which would have been unconscious to the writers themselves. It reminds me of Blavatsky's teaching of 7 keys of interpretation for every esoteric symbol or text.

On the other hand, I notice the channel has a video on "yoga is the dissolution of mental activity" and another on "ego death". So we might want to be careful there. I am not sure if or how aware the video producer is of the 'modern yoga' of Steiner, Scaligero, et al. where the esoteric dimensions are explored not through dissolution but through the focusing of spiritual activity, retracing concentrated thought-forms to the higher-order spiritual activity concealed in them. This is really the most important thing for penetrating into the depths of the Biblical and ancient wisdom texts and traditions. Otherwise, the 'esoteric' understanding remains mostly conceptual and flattened.

Thank you!