Federica wrote: ↑Thu Jun 01, 2023 10:56 am
I'm realizing that the reason my external life has taken the turns it has taken might be to make this development possible for me, because I'm certainly not one of the gifted ones who are able to remain focused and make progress by spending 5 focused minutes a day in moral-cognitive development, as Steiner says it's possible to do. I am very grateful for the favorable external conditions. Surely the worst thing I could do now is to believe they are "my property" and to waste them. Maybe a similar realization has occurred to others reading here, to put in contrast with a prior phase in life when one was wondering "what is the meaning of all this?".
Federica,
That is a key insight to take hold of and nourish. As Cleric discussed in that post, perceiving the higher-order intents, the curvatures of destiny, which structure the 'frames' of our lives, really helps us grasp our stream of becoming more and more holistically. Even if we are only conceiving them intellectually at first, it will help loosen the intellectual mask which constantly fragments our conception-perception and prepare us for higher cognitive experience. We could say there are a few interwoven spheres of destiny, or 'geodesics' along which our stream of becoming flows.
1 - destiny as the fourth hierarchy of humanity
2 - epochal destiny (we are now experiencing the 5th post-Atlantean epoch)
3 - destiny within various communities such as family, nation or 'folk'
4 - destiny within current incarnation
We could add several more layers within each of these, like the rhythmic 7-year stages of development within an incarnation or our daily destiny. Any given intent which steers our stream of becoming will relate to all of these overlapping spheres, but to some more proximately than others. Much of that destiny will relate to our physical body interacting with a physical environment - physiology, geography, climate, etc. That remains the most dim to our normal consciousness. But there are also soul-level factors of destiny, like the communities we belong to, the language we share, the way we feel and think through that language, etc. Then there are more purely spiritual factors like our beliefs and world-outlooks. These can become the most lucid to our normal consciousness (but we are still viewing them from the outside-in until we develop imaginative consciousness which penetrates to deeper soul strata responsible for them).
What you pointed to relates most proximately to #4, but since it concerns higher cognitive development, also to #2. It is the task of the 5th epochal civilization to develop the spiritual soul which becomes more and more receptive to the inflowing Christ impulse towards spiritual freedom and universal love. In the case of everyone here, our destiny was steered towards the world-outlook of analytic idealism, as expressed through BK. It's interesting how there is no conceivable way we would have met on this forum through factors of purely physical or even cultural destiny, which are largely outside our conscious purview and control. It is in the very nature of these forums that they are reached through the tip of our spiritual activity which is relatively free in its lucid life of ideas-ideals. That is especially true if we had to work through materialistic ideas first and make a solemn commitment to deviate from those towards idealism. But now it also remains in our freedom, and therefore our sphere of creative responsibility, to further harmonize our activity with the higher incarnational and epochal intents by pursuing the portals to the supra-sensory which have presented themselves.
Another way to approach these intents is from the top-down perspective, which Cleric also provided with the metaphors relating to Angelic consciousness and our life destiny. We know about the local hysteresis rhythm - after we submerge our will into the sensory spectrum, we 'step back' and contemplate the meaning of the impressions in thinking. Likewise, we could consider our entire incarnation as our higher Self - who is interwoven with the 3rd hierarchy or 'humanity' of previous aeons - submerging into the sensory spectrum. When we die, the fruits of that experience are 'contemplated' across the threshold by the higher beings of our nature to prepare for the next phase of incarnational and epochal destiny. Steiner speaks of the life tableau which we experience in the etheric body for a few days after death and that is a good way to understand what's happening - it provides an extract of our life which gets imprinted into the astral body and expands with us into the Cosmic spheres for further 'contemplation' (now contemplating not only sensory impressions, but our inner soul forces themselves). Every epoch of civilization likewise goes through its hysteresis rhythm, which manifests as phases of materializing impulses and spiritualizing impulses. We have now crossed over the first third of the 5th epoch, which of course descended deep into materialism where we lost consciousness of the spirit altogether. Now we are back in a spiritualizing phase and we can freely harmonize our spiritual activity with the overarching intent of bringing humanity to a consciousness of what takes place across the threshold of death (which is in a certain sense an inner recapitulation/elaboration of the central intent of the 3rd Egyptian epoch).